Clelia Scala

Clelia Scala is a theatre artists, visual artist, and story designer. Her work includes mask and puppet design, costume design, shadow puppetry, installations, collage, and illustration. Her explorations into the fantastic and uncanny stem from a lifelong engagement with tales and myths and her interest in the theme of human interaction with the natural world.

As a designer and fabricator for theatre, Clelia has worked with theatre companies and institutions such as Carousel Players, Geordie Theatre, Guilty by Association, Lemon Bucket Orkestra, Odyssey Theatre, Queen’s University, Suitcase in Point, University of Missouri-St Louis Opera Theatre, Yale University, and Zacadia Circus. Clelia’s visual art has shown in galleries in Canada and the United States and is in private collections across North America.

Publications include collages for the books Alice Through the Working Class (Dr. Cicero Books 2022) and Alice in Plunderland (BookThug 2015) by Steve McCaffery and collages for I Can Say Interpellation (BookThug 2011) by Stephen Cain.

Clelia’s short stop motion film, The Boat of Bones was included in the Center for Puppetry Arts’ Xperimental Puppetry Festival in Atlanta, GA in 2018. Her current personal projects include a sculptural series about her experience of the Eastern Ontario woodlands; Jars, a puppet play about eating; and a series of futuristic masks, tentatively titled Pataphysical Masks: Faces for a Possible Future.

Clelia is the recipient of the 2019 Established Artist Award for the City of St Catharines. Her work has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Kingston Arts Council, and the St Catharines Cultural Investment Program (with Puppet-A-Go-Go).