Lori Hopkins
Lori has been a professional puppeteer since 2012. She decided to go to drama school and gained a place at Rose Bruford College in 2006. In her second year of study she had the opportunity to spend four months on placement at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Prague, where she studied puppetry - academically, in performance and also making.
During her time in Prague Lori knew that she wanted to pursue a career working with puppets so after graduating in 2009 she then commenced a post-graduate training with London School of Puppetry and was able to develop her skills. All of this training was rewarded with her first professional job playing Pinocchio (with a carved, tabletop puppet) in Peter O'Rourke's production in 2012.
Since starting out at Little Angel Theatre Lori has appeared in numerous productions for the company including The Bed, We're Going On A Bear Hunt, Me..., Smartest Giant in Town, Macbeth and many more. As well as performing for Little Angel, Lori also performs for various other theatre companies; most recently Bamboozle Theatre, Fierylight and Smoking Apples.
In Summer 2022 she puppeteered in a new production for Told By An Idiot which explores what it means to be an underdog and the Aston Villa 1982 European cup victory with puppets made by Lyndie Wright.
Lori loves to perform with a wide variety of puppets such as marionette, shadow, rod, bunraku-style and giant puppets. She has created three of her own productions which she tours both in the U.K. and abroad. Her new show Laika the Space Dog is aimed at family audiences and premiered in Summer 2022.
Alongside her puppetry career, Lori also delivers a huge amount of education and community work, some of which involves puppets but also specialising in Shakespeare, storytelling and work with young people with learning disabilities. In 2013 she joined Shakespeare's Globe Education and now uses her puppetry experience to help students, teachers and young people to access Shakespeare through a visual form.