Robin Frohardt

Known for her rich aesthetic and highly detailed constructions, Robin Frohardt is visual artist, puppet designer and director living in Brooklyn, NY. Her original play “The Pigeoning” hailed by the New York Times as “a tender, fantastical symphony of the imagination,” debuted in 2013 and continues to tour at home and abroad and has been translated into German, Greek, Arabic and Turkish. In 2016 she received a Creative Capital Award for her new work “The Plastic Bag Store” an installation and performance that takes place in a fake grocery store in a real storefront and addresses the long term impact of disposable plastic packaging. She is currently developing the work through a DisTil Fellowship at the University of North Carolina. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and the first artist in Residence at Olson Kundig a renown design and architecture firm in Seattle.

“I have been told that I have a knack for taking a simple premise to an elaborate realization. Which either means that I can take a joke entirely too far, or it means that I have found my authentic obsession and have connected it to my deep commitment to craft. For that last 15 years, I have used narrative based film, puppetry, sculpture, and animation as a way to perform human experiences that are sometimes difficult to articulate through language. Humor is at the core of my process; it is how I cope with the tragic parts of modernity, and it allows audiences to reflect upon things in our lives that are sometimes impossible to reconcile. My work tends to use recognizable materials, often trash, to create richly detailed worlds that make magic of the mundane and highlight the trivialities of daily life in the context of the end of the world that is always and never coming.”

Profile photograph by Lovis Ostenrik