Dr Sabrina Recoules Quang

Puppeteer, Textile Artist & Creative Technologist

Sabrina is an artist, puppeteer and researcher working with material-led storytelling across textiles, objects, movement and responsive technologies. In her performances and installations, puppets interact with their environments, materials shift in colour or texture, and narratives unfold through embodied, sensory engagement. 

Her practice blends traditional puppetry and textile craft with computational tools, never displacing its craft voice: technology stays subordinate to feeling, supporting and extending material storytelling rather than replacing it. This practice is transdisciplinary by design, treating puppetry, textile craft and electronics as one integrated method. Drawing on thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Ron Wakkary, her work explores material agency, care and co-existence, engaging themes of migration, sustainability and diversity without reducing them to fixed narratives.

Current Research & Funded Projects

• Developing Storytelling with Weaving, Sensors and Puppetry. Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) grant, Arts Council England (2025–26). Research into improvisational Saori weaving, responsive and chromic materials, and material-led puppetry dramaturgy. Outdoor testing showed thermochromic activation struggles in cold conditions, shifting the work toward acoustic and humidity-based responsiveness; developed in collaboration with a puppeteer and an e-textile designer.
  
• Textile Migrants-An Ecological Tale (2026–ongoing). Currently developing a stop-motion puppet film, developing a transdisciplinary method that treats puppetry, textile craft and electronics as one integrated practice.

Selected Works

• 2024  E-stitches (zine publication)
• 2018  The Code is a Shadow Bubble, EVA Conference, V&A London, UK
• 2017  Look at the Other, Virtuality Mortality, Ugly Duck, London , UK Overlap, MA/MFA Computational Arts, Goldsmiths, UK
• 2016  Working Girl Goes to Motherhood, Nursery Theatre London, UK. My Name Is, Drama Art Centre, Malta. 
• 2015  My Name Is, Eden Gallery Berlin, DE & Drama Art Centre Malta
  Metamorphosis, Suspense Festival, Little Angel Theatre, UK
• 2014  City Girl, Trunkated, Blue Elephant Theatre, London, UK
• 2013  City Girl, Skipton Festival
• 2012  Wild Night of the Witches, Little Angel Theatre

Academic 

• Visiting Lecturer, Royal College of Art (2019–2024)  Textile Design, Design Research, Executive Education
  
• Member, Soft Systems Research Group, Royal College of Art

Education

• PhD in Textiles, Royal College of Art, London (2024)  
  Thesis: “Storytelling with Material Interferences” – practice-led research in puppetry, responsive textiles, and material agency
• MFA in Computational Arts, Goldsmiths, University of London (2016–2018)
• Movement and Improvisation Practitioner, LISPA, Berlin (2014–2015)
• Diploma in Puppetry, London School of Puppetry (2010–2013) 
• Additional training at Little Angel Theatre and Puppets in Prague  Clowning with Angela de Castro (Why Not Institute)