Manual Cinema

Manual Cinema is an Emmy Award-winning performance collective, design studio, and film/video production company founded in 2010 by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller, and Kyle Vegter. The company combines handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, and innovative sound and music to create immersive stories for stage and screen.

Using vintage overhead projectors, multiple screens, puppets, actors, live feed cameras, multi-channel sound design, and live music, Manual Cinema transforms the experience of attending the cinema and imbues it with liveness, ingenuity, and theatricality. The company received an Emmy Award in 2017 for The Forger, a video created for the New York Times, and was named Chicago Artists of the Year in 2018 by the Chicago Tribune. The group’s shadow puppet animations are featured in the film remake of Candyman, directed by Nia DaCosta and produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions. Recent productions include Leonardo! A Wonderful Show about a Terrible Monster, based on books by Mo Willems; an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (co-produced by Cal Performances); and a revamped production of The Magic City, based on Edith Nesbit’s 1910 novel. In 2023, Manual Cinema completed production on its first self-produced short film, Future Feeling, and the group toured with folk rock band Iron & Wine the following year. The company’s newest production, The 4th Witch, an inversion of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, premiered at the Spoleto Festival in June 2025.

Manual Cinema has toured throughout North America and to four continents. Highlights include Under the Radar/The Public Theater (New York City), and the Adelaide Festival (Australia), Santiago a Mil International Theatre Festival (Chile), Edinburgh Fringe Festival (Scotland), and Tehran International Puppet Festival (Iran). The company has received commissioning support for new works from Cal Performances, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Kennedy Center, ArtsEmerson (Boston), the Spoleto Festival (USA), The Poetry Foundation, and La Monnaie de Munt (Belgium). Manual Cinema has also received grant support from the National Theater Project, US Artists International, and ArtsCONNECT.

Follow Manual Cinema at manualcienema.com, @manual_cinema, and via Patreon.