Rachel Warr is a theatre director and dramaturg specialising in puppetry. She is also trained in dance, mime, and mask. Her work includes rod, shadow, light, strings, glove, object, and Bunraku puppetry. Her productions have been presented at venues across the United Kingdom and have represented the UK at festivals in Singapore, Germany, France, and the Czech Republic. She is currently collaborating with theatre companies in Romania and Canada.
Her work as a dramaturg involves collaborating with playwrights and devising ensembles on shaping narrative structure. She leads regular workshops on writing for visual theatre and puppetry and is regularly a guest tutor at several London drama schools. Her work has won a Royal Television Society Craft and Design Award (2017) and has been nominated for a Total Theatre award. She is the artistic director of Dotted Line Theatre.
In addition to creating theatre productions, Rachel is engaged in a number of cross-disciplinary collaborations and research projects. These including projects with surgical teams, clinicians, and GPs, exploring parallels between skillsets required in medicine and puppetry; with a bio-scientist and a magician exploring ways of communicating embodied knowledge; and collaboration with product designers to explore kinaesthetic empathy.
Rachel is a member of the Art Workers’ Guild and is currently a Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum.