About Lydia Stein
I started organizing community murals after high school in my hometown, Worcester, MA. When I dropped out of Yale University in 1997 I went into mural painting full time. I lived in an intentional community and did a lot of anti-war and economic justice activism as well.
I joined the Bread and Puppet Theater in 2001 and stayed with the company until 2005, working under the brilliant artist and director Peter Schumann. I got to travel all over the world performing political puppet shows, and lived and performed in Vermont when we weren’t on tour. I learned to garden, milk the cow, drive the tour bus, conduct rehearsals and workshops, produce and wiggle papier-mâché puppets, speak, sing, dance, as well as play accordion and trombone.
I spent about six months in Vermont in 2006 working for Bernie Sanders’ U.S. Senate campaign as a Regional Field Organizer. Bernie became the first Socialist ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate.
I moved to Providence, RI to finish my Undergraduate Degree at Brown University. There I continued to make puppets and murals with groups of young people, and organized a project called HousEART matching local artists with teens to produce eleven temporary murals on vacant foreclosed houses. I also took up silk screening and woodblock printing, began working with the committee to organize the HONK! Festival of Activist Street Bands, and founded the companion festival PRONK! in Providence, myself performing on euphonium, trombone, and sousaphone with various street bands.
Now based in New Orleans, I have embraced a wide variety of media in all dimensions. My work ranges from acting in conventional theater, to producing and performing large scale puppet shows, to playing brass in street parades and singing in clubs, to restoring historic blighted homes, to painting temporary murals and creating a giant papier-mâché monument for the organization Paper Monuments. My current work in fabric merges the vibrancy and richness of a painter’s palette with the texture and sensuality of live theater and the subtle subversion of a traditional woman’s craft.