Wooly Mar is the moniker of interdisciplinary artist and musician Maria Pugnetti. Pugnetti earned an undergraduate degree in painting from UC Santa Cruz and has spent the last decade exploring different creative mediums both material and digital. Pugnetti’s creative repertoire includes painting, fiber arts, video, sound, lighting design and shadow puppetry.
Maria Pugnetti works as a lighting, sound and projection designer and has served as a technical consultant, technical director and guest teacher for theater companies in and around Southern Vermont for the last 10 years.
In her own productions, Pugnetti often incorporates projection, upcycled fabric sets, intricate costuming and shadow puppetry to create lush scenes for her sonic folklore. Her original music braids together electronic rock and folk music.
As a graphic designer she has created album designs for musicians from Israel to the Faroe Islands most notable among them are Mariee Sioux’s “Faces in the Rocks” and Gudrid Hansdottir’s “Beyond the Grey”.
Pugnetti has been designing shadow theater for over a decade. She co-produced and composed the multimedia folk opera The Mabel Story which included shadow theater, and animation. She graduated from Sandglass Theater’s Summer Puppetry Intensive and a Shadow Puppetry Intensive with Stephen Kaplan.
She collaborated with Vermont Author, GennaRose Nethercott to create the shadow puppetry and video art for the 2017 production, Ghostmaker and went on to work with Nethercott on the shadow crankie art for The Lumberjack’s Dove and the shadow art for the book tour of her 2022 debut novel Thistlefoot. Most recently, Maria performed an excerpt of my solo production The Red Shoes at the 2023 Baltimore Crankie Festival.
For more information email: info@woolymar.com
