Anna Sobel has always been a storyteller.

Her first theatrical experience at Nightingale—a production of Robin Hood in Class III—is so seared into her memory that she can still recall her lines (all four of them) at a moment’s notice. That early spark was followed by her star turn as Major General Stanley in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance in Middle School. To this day, she still has every single program from her productions on 92nd Street.

Anna arrived at Nightingale in Class I and recalls her time as a student (all 12 years) with great fondness. In addition to her flair for the dramatic, in Upper School she was an active member of CAFE (Cultural Appreciation for Everyone) and adored her English classes. Her love of creative writing took off at Nightingale, so much so that she was inspired to major in English at Wesleyan. But the future was still uncertain when it came to a potential career. 

Inspiration struck the summer after Anna’s freshman year when she attended Bread and Puppet Theater’s final presentation of the Domestic Resurrection Circus, a two-day outdoor festival of puppetry, in Vermont. It was there that she began to see how puppetry could be used as a powerful means of communication and activism—essentially a creative cousin to journalism.

“I’d really never experienced puppetry like that before. Activism, especially for environmental causes, was and
is still very important to me. At the time, I wanted to be a journalist. But when I saw how Bread and Puppet used
puppetry to make an appeal to the emotions to the degree that one would leave a performance raring to go out there and take a stand; that’s what really hooked me.” 

And that was that. She returned to Wesleyan, declared herself a puppeteer, and began working in the Wesleyan costume shop, teaching herself how to sew and designing costumes for mainstage productions.

She also began to work with Kids on the Block, a puppetry company that introduces audience members to the differences and similarities between people. Today, the company’s puppets include individuals who have Down Syndrome, hearing and visual deficits, cerebral palsy, autism, ADHD, epilepsy, and learning disabilities. Introducing these individuals to children via puppets encourages them to ask questions that they may otherwise be embarrassed to ask a human being. This experience of breaking the fourth wall with an audience would later become an essential component in Anna’s original puppet shows.

Upon graduating from Wesleyan in 2001, Anna made her way down to Washington, D.C. after noting an ad on puppeteers.org for a company that claimed “no experience necessary.” After an audition that required her to showcase 38 different voices, Anna spent the next two years with Blue Sky Puppet Theatre, traveling to schools throughout the D.C. area teaching kids about important, age-appropriate topics. This included bully prevention, saying no to drugs, or even how to use math in real life outside the classroom—subject matter that one hopes students respond to and internalize—with puppetry being a magical way to do that. 

As Anna’s puppetry practice grew, so did her artistry and her desire to use her skillset and voice as a storyteller to communicate bigger ideas. After two years in D.C. learning how to perform educational puppet shows, she was ready to expand her knowledge and if possible, travel internationally. She began to consider what it would look like to study puppetry in India via a Fulbright scholarship. “India is so varied, it’s like visiting many countries, and Fulbright restricts you to a single country for the nine-month period. Not the most romantic answer, but those were the logistics I was working with to craft my own DIY master’s in puppetry, in a sense,” she shared.

In a classic case of being in the right place at the right time, a bright yellow pamphlet caught her eye in the National Library one afternoon. Produced in India for people in India, it contained information about teaching oral rehydration via puppetry. It was meant to be. She noted, “Finding that pamphlet meant that I had a mystery to solve: where did the idea of using puppetry to spread the social messages of newly independent India come from, and why was it so successful? It turns out puppetry was a natural fit because it was already such an integral part of the culture, even in the most remote villages.”

On the plus side, Anna knew that she was stepping into a country with a celebrated history of puppetry, with references to the art form dating back to the ninth century BCE. Each region is known for a particular style—marionettes, shadow puppets, rod puppets, or glove puppets—and has developed storytelling through those means to emphasize religion, mythology, social expectations, and even the government’s agenda. 

However, her nine months in India were not without challenge. During her time there, she faced numerous setbacks: one school had just lost all of their puppets in a flood and a teacher she was set to study with had relocated to Delhi with no estimated date of return. Despite these seemingly dead ends, she was able
to unearth unforeseen opportunities and learning.

Ever resourceful, she scoured a website that listed every puppeteer in India and ended up making many cold calls to ensure that her time in India was well spent. This included studying shadow puppetry in Kerala, working on a television show in Delhi that spoofed current events via puppetry in a quick three-minute segment after the actual news, and even presenting at a conference on education and puppetry. Her nine months in India were transformative and gave way to an understanding of herself as an artist in a way that she hadn’t before. 

“Having just a couple of puppet construction techniques in my toolkit before I left meant I had some currency to trade, and could meet other artists on their own turf, rather than as just a researcher or journalist. It really changed me to be able to think of myself that way. When I first arrived in India and my plans of studying puppetry at Darpana Academy fell through, this funny fellow named Ramesh, who spoke very little English, used to take me around Ahmedabad by bike every day and inspire me by showing me art and introducing me to artists and puppeteers. I still remember how he used to shout ‘This the new idea!!!’ That’s how I learned to ‘fill the artist’s well,’ as [writer] Julia Cameron puts it, to keep refreshing my creative well by exposing myself to other artists and their work,” Anna said.

Upon her return to New York, Anna was at another crossroads. She knew she wanted to work with puppets and she knew she wanted to make a difference in the world, but what did that mean at this point in her life? Reality hit like a ton of bricks. “It was the hardest year of my life. I was torn in so many different directions and plagued by insecurity and the uncertainty of having the blank canvas of my life spread out before me. Until then, I had planned and anticipated what came next and how to excel at each phase. To find myself without any clear path ahead was very scary,” she recalled.

She began to take classes in literacy and early childhood education at Bank Street College, thinking maybe she would use puppetry in a career as a reading specialist. But that fit wasn’t quite right, so she enrolled in the educational theatre program at NYU, where she ultimately received her master’s degree. In her heart of hearts, though, she knew she was an artist, a performer, and a storyteller, and it was time to get out of her own way and found her own puppet company. 

And thus, Talking Hands Theatre was born in Brooklyn in 2004. She worked steadily for four years, creating her own shows for children’s birthday parties, until the financial crash of 2008. 

Unsure of what her future in puppetry in New York City looked like, and after a three-month stint in Thailand working with Burmese puppeteers, she packed up her belongings and moved to New England to begin anew with Talking Hands Theatre. “I had always wanted to live in the country…A camp counselor of mine that I had kept in touch with had built a cabin in Western Massachusetts, and she said I would love the way this area combines rural beauty with city-like cultural offerings—the best of both worlds! Now I drive a lot for each show, but my commute takes me past rivers decorated in ice, steam rising off the local lake, and the morning sun peeking through autumn leaves. That beats the NYC traffic any day!”

Anna now lives there with her husband, a musician and fellow collaborator, and her two sons. Her goal is to build one show each year—all the way from a sketchbook of ideas, to a fully realized script, then the building of the puppets, the creation of the voices, the construction of the stage, the composition of the songs, the rehearsals, and finally the performance. Her goal with each show is to engage the audience in a way that includes them as active participants and gives them something to walk away with. 

In doing so, she has made a mark on the world and ultimately created a positive ripple effect. She takes pride in her ability to break the fourth wall and leave audience members with a feeling of connection—to her, to the characters, and to the story—often in 45 minutes or less. “Each show has a moral, educational concept or underlying message that I’m using the medium of puppetry to convey…I know I’m successful when children laugh, when they focus on the show instead of what happened before or afterwards, and when they want to make a person-to-person connection with me after the show,” Anna noted.

Her most recent show, Robotic, tackles social-emotional learning and asks the question: “Do robots have feelings?” as a way to dive into seven human emotions. Other shows in her roster include, Whale Tales (meeting undersea creatures), Fairies of the Seasons (understanding how the natural world changes with the seasons), and Big Daddy Z and the Greeks (an introduction to the well-known characters of Greek mythology). In addition to these more “academically” inclined shows, Anna also creates puppet shows that are connected to her Jewish background that tell the stories of the high holidays and/or cherished traditions. 

These days, Anna’s schedule is full, as she performs all over New England at libraries, community centers, birthday parties, churches, synagogues, and schools. Her stick-to-itiveness and commitment to her passion have allowed her to build a thriving career in an industry that does not promise wealth or lasting success.
And yet, here she is, nearly three decades since her first summer at Bread and Puppet, living an intentional life full of creativity, storytelling, and performing—exactly what she has always loved. The dedication required to have reached this point is not for the faint of heart though, and upon reflection, it’s evident that her time at Nightingale laid the groundwork for her drive and focus, ultimately achieving success in a somewhat out-of-the-box career. 

During her time on 92nd Street, Anna was not a part of the “mainstream” crowd, as she calls it. In fact, she took pride in not conforming and remembers always being filled with an unshakeable confidence to be herself. Her teachers not only encouraged her creativity throughout Lower, Middle, and Upper School, but they also drilled into her the idea that she could do or be whatever she wanted to in life. 

And, in an all-girls’ classroom, she felt free to take intellectual risks and fully own her abilities, without the pressure to dim her light or pretend that she wasn’t smart. As a result, Anna cultivated a strong enough belief in herself to ultimately ride out the inevitable struggles—financial and emotional—that arose with freelance work. She never gave up on her dreams to pursue puppetry full time. 

“Growing up as a Nightingale girl, I felt empowered. The idea of a glass ceiling was simply not conceivable to me. At a difficult time in my life, when I returned from India and had to decide on my next step, it was overwhelming to have such freedom. Now that I’ve seen firsthand the boundaries that race, income, and gender still pose around the world, I never take those freedoms for granted. I feel it as an injunction to live my best life!”

And of course, there are the exceptional time-management skills that she cultivated as a student at Nightingale. She learned how to use time efficiently and how to manage expectations and her workload. That preparation helps her push through the moments of internal resistance that inevitably arise when she feels overwhelmed during the creation and production of a new show, not to mention her juggling responsibilities as the mother of two young boys. But she always knows she will get her work done—because she was taught how to do just that.

In the 1997 edition of The Bamford, Nightingale’s yearbook, Anna’s senior page included a quote from American artist Sister Corita Kent that begins with the following: “We have all this beauty around us and yet we, who are
grown-ups, often forget about it and lose ourselves in our offices and imagine that what we are doing is very important work. I hope you will be more sensible and open your eyes and ears to this beauty and life that surrounds you.” 

Reading it in 2026 feels almost prophetic.

Anna’s story is one of passion and resilience, artistry and perseverance. Fiercely independent and proud to march to the beat of her own drum, she saw the life she wanted for herself and she built it—puppet by puppet.