Susan Simpson is an experimental theater artist, visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Los Angeles. Simpson’s work often involves intricate hand-made avatars and manipulated film and video projection, and deals with uncanny doublings and the pathos of artifice.
Her puppet plays have been presented in New York, Seattle and Los Angeles including such venues as the HERE Art Center in New York, The Museum of Jurassic Technology and The Santa Monica Museum. Her most recent film, Boll Weevil Days, played at festivals across Europe and the U.S. A solo exhibition of her sculptures and video work entitled Dreamers, Thank You. Come Again is up now at The Sheehan Gallery at Whitman College, in Walla Walla Washington.
Simpson is the co- founder and co-director of Automata, a non-profit organization devoted to presentation, preservation and advancement of puppet theater, experimental film, pre-cinema, and other forgotten or neglected performance art forms. In 2007, under the auspices of Automata, Simpson opened The Manual Archives, a micro theater and exhibition space devoted to the presentation of newly discovered and invented folklore of Los Angeles. At the Manual Archives Simpson is in the midst of presenting Concrete Folk Variations, a serial puppet play and deconstructed crime thriller centered around the early rumblings of the gay rights movement in L.A. The Los Angeles Times declared that Susan Simpson’s work "radicalizes and reinvents the notion of puppet- theater."
Simpson is on the faculty at the CalArts School of Theater. She has received grants from the Durfee Foundation, The California Community Foundation, Creative Capital, Multi- Arts Production Fund, and The Center for Cultural Innovation.