Emily Schubert

Emily was born and raised in the borderlands between Cincinnati, Ohio and Northern Kentucky. She has a BFA in fiber and textile art from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is currently based in Pittsburgh, PA, where she lives with her partner and two cats.

Emily Schubert is an interdisciplinary artist working mainly in the worlds of puppetry, performance, sculpture and collage. She is inspired by the fantastical and the everyday and how these shape peoples' perception of the world. Drawing from mythology, folktales, memories, and personal experience she creates narratives and characters that aim to make some sense of our existence by giving form to our collective anxieties and desires. She has worked in many fields, made costumes for traveling Broadway shows, participated in puppet theater festivals and workshops in Europe, Indonesia, and the United States and has found a passion for growing her own food and flowers along the way. Enthralled by the emotive power and depth of expression achieved through puppetry and storytelling, she believes that within these realms lies a source of real-life magic that is deficient in much of our daily lives!

We live in an ever-changing uncontrollable reality and at times it becomes difficult to make sense of all that is happening within and outside of our present selves.

Emily creates objects to grapple with the philosophical quandaries life presents. An interdisciplinary approach allows Emily to address these quandaries in the way she sees fit. Her responses vary from the immediate visual poetry of collage to the intricacies of creating a many-pieced character costume, to the layered process of writing, building, and rehearsing short performances. Each practice informs the others in the way many facets combine to create an identity. She is drawn to tactile materials and methods and is interested in the use of repurposed and found objects adding layers of complexity and interconnection to the work. Though the questions may never be answered, her attempts, though futile, are a personal leap forward into the perplexity of the afore unknown.