Sebastienne Mundheim is a performance-maker, installation artist, and educator with more than 30 years of experience in interdisciplinary arts and arts education. Her work integrates visual installation, puppetry, storytelling, dance, and theater. In addition to making her own work, Mundheim is a thought partner and consultant for numerous other artists and arts organizations.
Mundheim began her career as a painter and writer, earning her BA and BFA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. Wanting to get away from solitary studio practice, she began working in communities designing and implementing parades, installations, and arts-based learning experiences. In 2007, she focused her practice by founding and artistic-directing White Box Theatre, a project-based nonprofit which creates responsive and immersive interdisciplinary, arts-based learning experiences, performances, and public events for people of all ages. Works are created in partnership with museums, universities, theatre companies, dance troupes, community groups, and schools.
Arts and culture organizations and institutions that have commissioned and presented works with Mundheim and White Box Theatre include Philadelphia Museum of Art, Barnes Foundation, Vermont Performance Lab, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts, and the Irish Ministry of Arts and Culture. Muncheim’s collaborators include Whit McLaughlin, New Paradise Laboratories; Kate Watson-Wallace, Anonymous Bodies; Thaddeus Phillips, Lucidity Suitcase; Hua-Hua Zhang and Kun Yang Lin, Kun Yang Lin Dance; Tania Isaac Dance; and Brian Sanders, JUNK. The Lenfest Foundation, New England Foundation for the Arts, Pew Charitable Trust, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and Trust for Mutual Understanding, are among those that have supported her work.
In 2017, Mundheim received national recognition from the Kennedy Center for the Arts College Theatre Festival for distinguished achievement in puppetry design and direction and distinguished achievement in overall production. In 2014, she won Barrymores — Philadelphia’s Excellence in Theatre Award — for outstanding design and for best ensemble for her adaptation of A Child’s Christmas in Wales. In 2013, she received an Independence Foundation Fellowship for writing. In 2011, she was a finalist for the Pew Fellowship in the Arts.
Mundheim studied puppetry at the O’Neill Center, Sandglass Puppetry Institute, and with Hua Hua Zhang. She also studied with the Hand Spring Puppet Company in South Africa in 2010 with support from the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative. She received her Masters in Education from Harvard in 2000.
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