Training & Lineage

My work is shaped by more than two decades of artistic practice, facilitation, performance training, somatic study, and participatory experimentation across social, therapeutic, and creative contexts.

Deep Puppetry™, School of the Small and Imperfect, and the Relational Field Sessions and Labs grow out of these foundations, but are not reducible to any one of them.

Rather than understanding lineage as inheritance, I understand lineage as relationship: an evolving conversation with the teachers, methods, communities, and fields that have shaped my orientation toward shared agency, ethical contact, and non-dominating ways of working.

What follows is an overview of the influences that most inform the practice.

Relational & Developmental Inquiry

Social therapeutics, ensemble process, collective improvisation, and performance-based development have strongly shaped how I understand human change as something that happens between people rather than inside isolated individuals.

These approaches inform how I work with participation, responsibility, coordination, and collective world-making inside live group interaction.

Applied Performing Arts & Aesthetic Practices

  • Theatre of the Oppressed (Jiwon Chung)

  • Social Presencing Theater (Arawana Hayashi)

  • Mask, clown, fool, and bouffon (Eric Davis, David Bridel, Misha Usov, Robyn Hambrook, Deborah Antoinette Ward)

  • Play, social experimentation, ritual

  • Improvisation and ensemble process

  • Natural voicework (Frankie Armstrong)

These practices shaped my understanding of timing, presence, disruption, collective attention, and how new forms of participation can be rehearsed socially.

Somatic & Movement-Based Study

  • Neurodevelopmental movement and reflex integration (RMTi, MNRI®)

  • Autism Movement Therapy® (Joanne Lara)

  • Neuroscience of embodied collaboration (WiseMotion)

  • Feldenkrais and Linklater

  • Trauma-informed somatic coursework and Safe and Sound Protocol training

  • Violence prevention through movement (Kornblum)

  • Expressive movement and dance (Centre for Creative Arts Therapy)

These studies inform my understanding of pacing, embodiment, attention, regulation, and how bodies organize participation before conscious choice.

Ecological & Place-Based Study

Applied ecopsychology, eco-art therapy, psychogeography, walking practice, and place-based inquiry shaped my understanding of relationship beyond the human social field.

These practices deepened my interest in materiality, animacy, environment, and how place participates in perception, attention, and collective experience.

Object-Based and Material Practices

  • Diploma in Puppet Therapy (Muñecoterapia Chile)

  • Therapeutic puppetry training (Children’s Therapy Centre)

  • Object theatre and puppetry (Gary Friedman)

These approaches informed the early development of Deep Puppetry™, which gradually evolved beyond therapeutic and symbolic frameworks into a relational and participatory practice in its own right.

Earlier Professional Contexts

Before developing her current practice, Laura worked across community arts, hospice care, youth outreach, public health education, expressive arts facilitation, voicework, ritual practice, and trauma-informed movement work.

Her background includes theatre programs for street-involved youth, hospice companionship, homelessness prevention initiatives, community-based parenting education, and arts-based health promotion programs in schools and public settings.

These experiences shaped her long-standing interest in care, participation, collective environments, and the social conditions that organize human interaction.

She holds a BA in Sociology from the University of Georgia and a postgraduate diploma in Health Promotion.

Why I Share This

This list is not a claim to authority or a credentialing argument. It is a map of relationships and disciplines that have influenced the clarity, rigor, and ethics of the work.

Deep Puppetry™, the School of the Small and Imperfect, and the Relational Field Sessions and Labs are living practices, continually shaped by the people in the room, the materials we meet, and the relational conditions we co-create together.