The Dry Bio:
Beth Nixon is an interdisciplinary artist who works under the name Ramshackle Enterprises. Since 1998 Beth has been writing, building, performing, and touring her own solo clown and puppet shows, collaborating with other artists, and frequently facilitating the creation of puppet parades, pageants, and performances with groups of children and adults. Beth has worked with Pig Iron Theatre and Spiral Q (Philly), Red Moon Theater (Chicago), Bread and Puppet Theater (VT), and Big Nazo Puppets (RI). Beth has a BA in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, ME and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College in Plainfield, VT. Her graduate thesis work was entitled “Navigating Curious Terrain: An Illustrated Field Guild to Ethics, Power and Imagination in Community-Based Art and Personal Practice.”
Beth has performed her original work at seven Black Sheep International Puppetry Festivals in Pittsburgh. In the fall of 2006, she was commissioned to be the festival’s Featured Artist, transforming an enormous gallery space into an interactive sculptural installation. She has also performed at The Andorra International Festival of Women Clowns in the Pyrenees Mountains, Chicago’s Puppetropolis Festival, The Radicackilacky Puppetry Convergence in North Carolina, Boston’s Puppet Showplace Theater, ABC No Rio and HERE in New York City, and at numerous cabarets, house-shows, coffee shops and street corners. She is a member of Philly’s Puppet Uprising Collective. Her puppets have been displayed at The Constitution Center and the atrium at One Liberty Place in Philadelphia, as well as at SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine, Manchester Craftsman’s Guild in Pittsburgh, and in many storefronts, barns, and living rooms up and down the East Coast. Beth has been an artist-in-residence at dozens of schools, senior centers, and addiction recovery and mental health facilities, and has worked extensively with community groups, camps, and after-school programs. Beth was awarded a 2008 Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts and was a 2008 First Person Arts Artist-In-Residence. She was awarded a Spiral Q Artist Activist Award in 2009 and a 2011 Leeway Transformation Award for her art and social change work. She is a rostered teaching artist with The Pennsylvania Arts in Education Partnership.