JENNY ROMAINE
Co-Artistic Director
Jenny is a director, designer and puppeteer and co-founder/artistic director of the OBIE winning Great Small Works visual theater collective. She is music director of Jennifer Miller’s CIRCUS AMOK and artist in residence at Milk Not Jails and Inside Change. With Great mall Works Romaine performs, teaches, and directs in theaters, schools, parks, libraries, museums, prisons, street corners, and other public spaces, producing work on many scales, from gigantic outdoor spectacles with scores of participants, to miniature shows in living rooms. She has directed and designed community based spectacles for numerous projects in New York City and around the world. Romaine was a sound archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for 13 years and for several decades has drawn on Yiddish/Pan Jewish primary source materials to create art that has contemporary meaning. Her projects include the Sukkos Mob (featured in the film Punk Jews), community Purim Shpiln with the Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee, The Revival of the Uzda Gravediggers with Geoff Berner, Sadie Gold Shapiro, and Belarusian poets Siarhej Chareuski and Maryia Martysevich. “Bobe Mayses" – Yiddish Knights and Other Impossibilities with the Other Music Academy (Weimar/Berlin), Soul Songs: Great Women of Klezmer with the Philadelphia Folklore Project, and Muntergang and Other Cheerful Downfalls with Great Small Works. She partners with Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky, Ira Khonen Temple, Milo, Inside Change, Jessica Lurie, Daniel Majesty Sanchez (Z’L), Tychist Baker and many others. She was the first recipient of the Adrienne Cooper Award for Dreaming in Yiddish (2014), received a Marshall Meyer Risk-Taker Award from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (2015) and is featured in "Dazzle Camouflage: Spectacular Theatrical Strategies for Resistance and Resilience" a monograph by Ezra Berkley Nepon. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the Pratt Institute department of Performance Studies.