John Bell (b. 1951, San Francisco, California, USA) is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based theatre historian and puppeteer who began working in puppetry with Bread and Puppet Theater in the 1970s, and continued as a company member for over a decade, after which he earned his PhD degree in theatre history at Columbia University. He is the Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and an Associate Professor of Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut. A founding member of the Brooklyn-based Great Small Works theatre company, he is also an organiser of the Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA. Bell is also the author of American Puppet Modernism: Essays on Material World in Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); the editor of Puppets, Masks and Performing Objects (MIT Press, 2001), and co-editor (with Dassia Posner and Claudia Orenstein) of The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (Routledge, 2015).
