What is the World Puppetry Day?
Launched in 2003 by UNIMA, the World Puppetry Day (WPD) is both a real tool for the promotion of puppetry arts and a project allowing to unite the puppet actors of the same territory.
This world day seeks to promote the puppet arts by defending, among other objectives:
- the maintenance and the safeguard of the traditions and, in parallel, the renewal of the art of puppetry
- the use of puppetry as a means of ethical and aesthetic education
The World Puppet Day is now celebrated all over the world through its National Centres and their members.
This Day is the occasion to collectively and as widely as possible carry the diversity of puppetry arts today!
Theme of the 2025 – Robots, AI and the dream of the puppet?
Download or request a poster in your preferred language.
Share your events & Social Media Frame 2025
This year, there will be no global video, but UNIMA encourages everyone to celebrate World Puppetry Day through social media!
📢 How to participate:
✔ Share your events, programs, and photos by adding @unimainternational account
✔ Tag UNIMA on Facebook & Instagram
✔ Use the hashtags: #WPD2025 #UNIMA
Then, depending on your language:
#WorldPuppetryDay2025 | #DiaMundialMarioneta2025 | #JourneeMondialeMarionette2025
#(AnyLanguageWelcome)
UNIMA will showcase the diversity of your posts by resharing them on March 21st for 24 hours, followed by a global video compilation of what was shared that day.
Download Social Media Frame 2025:
Click HERE
A message that connects us!
Every year since 2006, a personality from the artistic or cultural sector is solicited to write the World Puppet Day message. It is a question of putting forward the values that UNIMA carries and that are in this millenary art, to carry a message of cohesion and to shed light on this art.
WPD Message 2025: International message of Linda Blanchet, Stefan Kaegi, Zaven Pare
A common poster
Every year since 2018, carte blanche is given to an artist in the world to make the poster for World Puppetry Day.
Each participating structure can use the World Puppetry Day poster, ask for it in its language at UNIMA and then download it on the UNIMA website.
What can we propose for the World Puppet Day?
Already, we can use what we have in common: The message, the poster and the video.
Then, this World Puppetry Day is celebrated in multiple forms. Each one appropriates it in its own way and proposes actions of different kinds:
- festivals,
- shows,
- puppet parade,
- exhibitions, installations,
- workshops for young and old,
- Behind-the-Scenes tours and onsite activities (e.g.: workshops, mini-performances, etc.)
- readings of the World Puppet Day message,
- night of the puppet
- …
Creating a common narrative
World Puppet Day is the perfect opportunity to create a multi-handed story!
- Create links and make with the educational and social structures on your territory: schools, colleges, social centers, hospitals…
- Imagine with other cultural associations: museums, companies, festivals, theaters, associations of amateur practices…
- Associate the elected representatives of your territories, your cities, your regions…
- Create a common communication tool with partners, with all those who propose events, workshops, shows, meetings, exhibitions, training courses, competitions… for this day on the scale of a city, a territory, a country, a continent!
- Disseminate information about World Puppet Day to your partners, your audiences, your network…
- Communicate your information on the UNIMA website and on the facebook page of the World Puppet Day.
TOGETHER, WE CREATE THE MOVEMENT!
So, do we go?