Artist

2025 was in many ways a challenging year, in ways that affected me personally as well as the greater collective. Despite that fact, I found many opportunities that have led me further down a path that I’m still discovering.

Pictured here with ArtsATL Executive Director Patti Siegel, Executive Editor Shane Harrison, and Senior Editor Denise James.

First, I am incredibly grateful for my now not-so-new role as Senior Editor at ArtsATL and the wonderful people and connections and work that I’m able to do with this worthy local arts publication. It has been a joy to immerse myself even further into the art scene here, including a foray into dance and performance art that has left me, quite literally, moved to tears multiple times.

I’m also quite grateful for the support I feel surrounding the Avondale Arts Alliance and the Avondale Arts Center, and we are celebrating a successful year full of art and community. The Avondale Arts Center celebrated its 1 year anniversary in February of 2025, and later I launched my first ever serious fundraiser for the nonprofit, which I’ve run since 2023. I found great success maintaining interest in the fundraiser and meeting — and exceeding — our donation goals through a series of silly social media videos. As a result of my willingness to get pied in the face and various other ridiculous challenges, we raised over $12k for the Avondale Arts Alliance. We hosted the first school showcases in the gallery featuring art by hundreds of local youths as well as our inaugural Plein Air Painting event at the Lake.

In 2026, we will launch our first two major public arts initiatives thanks to the support of Commissioner Ted Terry, who I have had the pleasure of getting to know in recent months. The future truly looks bright for our little slice of the world and I am thrilled to start 2026 on such solid footing.

In 2025 I also began working with Living Walls, a local mural organization led by one of the most visionary arts leaders working in Atlanta today; Monica Campana. Following an interview with Campana last year, Living Walls Executive Director Tatiana Bell asked me to help document the new murals going up in and around our fine city.

I was honored to photograph two new murals — one by Trudy Tran in Clarkston and another by nCarlosj in Scottdale. I am thrilled to be affiliated with this legacy arts organization in Atlanta and have really enjoyed getting to know the artists and community leaders involved with these public art projects.

We also published two issues of The Verge Avondale Estates Zine, a small-scale print publication produced in partnership with the Avondale Estates Business Association. For the publication, which is currently a periodical coming out 2-3 times per year, I am editor and art director. I also write and take pictures for some of the pieces, as well as curate the calendar, update the map, and promote news and events. The publication features artists and businesses in Avondale Estates, shining a spotlight on the stories of the people who make this city the incredible place that it is. We also were able to hire three local writers for the last edition which I am grateful to see — it is important to me to find opportunities to pay other creatives through my work.

A highlight: during the 2025 Atlanta Art Fair, I was invited to sit on Critical Abundance, a panel with some of Atlanta’s finest editors and arts writers, to discuss arts journalism in the city. I have really enjoyed seeing the Atlanta Art Fair grow over the past two years, and I can’t wait to see what the 2026 Art Fair holds for me. I am honored to be invited to speak about the arts and the city I love so deeply.

Big News: In 2025, I was honored as one of 100 DeKalb Leaders for Peace & Community at the Year-End Family Cultural Festival presented by HWPL Georgia for my work with the Avondale Arts Alliance. This nomination supports the ideas that I hold dear: that art has the power to bring about meaningful, transformational change and, yes, peace. Art is one of the original languages and it can connect and unite people across political, social, cultural and language divides. I was moved by the award, and see it as a recognition of my work and the importance of community art spaces.

In our society today, we have seen the pendulum swing pretty far into a digital-only world, where interactions and society and entertainment and work and everything is handled through a screen. There are absolutely many benefits to how connected and technologically supported our world is now, but there are also downsides. Lack of in-person, face-to-face interaction with our neighbors and community members can leave us feeling disconnected, isolated and alone. This is dangerous not just to the individual but to the society as a whole, and it’s why we have seen an increase in awareness of “3rd spaces” — places to be that are not work, or home, but instead a third space where socializing and engaging with the world can take place.

I am proud to report that the Avondale Arts Center is one of those 3rd places. It is a special place where people come together around the shared love of art, a place where new ideas flourish, people feel they belong, connections are fostered and strengthened, and where those involved can be part of building a community. A good example of the power of community art spaces was when our network donated over 1000 pounds of non-perishable foods to a local ministry following the cancellation of SNAP benefits in fall of 2025.

So what’s next?

Well, I am pleased to be back at work, getting into the flow of things at ArtsATL where my writers are sharing their perspectives on local art exhibitions, street art trends, dance performances, arts educators, and more.

I’m looking to add teammates to The Verge Avondale Estates Zine to help manage social media, website, and distribution. We are looking at what expansion looks like, and how to grow through the addition of paid help in areas that we lack support.

I’m on the lookout for an exhibition opportunity for some great portraits I took of an indigenous dance group in Churintzio, Mexico. They generously took me into the woods and performed just for me in their handmade regalia and ornate makeup. In fact, they even dressed me up and took my portrait at the end, which I found to be incredibly generous and inspiring. I have been waiting to find the ideal exhibition opportunity for this body of work in order to do it justice.

Expansiveness in 2026

I’m hopeful that 2026 is the year I’ll be able to make some of my bigger dreams come to life.

While I stay quite busy locally, I have always yearned to travel more, specifically in ways that are financially sustainable and profitable, while also leaning on my skills in photography, writing, illustration and public speaking. An ideal opportunity would be leading some kind of television program in which I could interview and meet artists around the world, teaching the audience about cultures and societies through art as well as how to look at and appreciate and interact with all kinds of art forms.

Similarly, I am interested in penning children’s travel books, which would employ both my photography as well as illustration to encourage children to explore the world and be great accompaniment to families who travel. This would employ my writing, photography and illustration skills in a way that I believe would be very life-giving.

I can’t wait to see what the future holds. Let’s go!

If you’re anything like me, you may have wondered at one time or another what mystery lays behind this door in Inman Park. I was lucky enough to get a chance to see inside The Workshop when I went there to meet with Raymond Carr, my friend and local puppeteer in the early hours of Halloween day.

The space is a conglomeration of different things and areas devoted to different organizations. The tall ceiling features a few skylights that bring attention to the large puppets hanging from the rafters. Work areas can be found along each wall and recessed into every corner.

There are buckets of spraypaint cans, rolls upon rolls of tape, and tools for woodworking as far as the eye can see.

Hidden pieces of art poke out from shelves, lean over railings, and dangle from the ceiling. On any given workspace there are sketches, craft supplies and tools.

Raymond met me and brought me around to the back of the building to see the giant, one-eyed robot speaker puppet he was finishing up for the Scoutmob Halloween Party at the Goat Farm later that night. The lumbering structure sat leaning forward, silver arms and legs splayed out around it on the ground underneath it. We spoke for a while about the difficulties of building this puppet in particular, including the mechanism sticking out of the back that would act as the suspension to raise the monster up and make it walk. He showed me the pulley system that made the eye move in its socket and made the mouth open and close, as well as gave me a run down of his loyal team of puppet masters.

Back inside we sat down and spoke about his career. “I’m a freelance artist and I’ve been doing this since I was a kid,” he told me. Raymond is the son of children’s ministers who worked in a megachurch, and that is where his desire to create began.

Carr relocated from the West Coast to Atlanta, received his degree in film from Georgia State University, and interned at The Center for Puppetry Arts where he eventually became a puppeteer and focused on experimental puppetry theater.

The Center for Puppetry Arts is the largest organization dedicated to the art form of puppetry in the nation, and includes a museum, education center, and performance space. The center is located in midtown near Atlantic Station and is open 7 days a week. Click here to see their Facebook page, learn more about upcoming events, and check it out for yourself!

“That was my first real chance to experience a full time artist’s life,” Raymond said of the experience, which helped to set the tone for his career path. Later he began working in the film industry as a PA and then from there worked his way into the art department on local film sets.

Raymond’s career took a leap when he became involved with a show called Lazy Town for which he spent a year living in Iceland. The production is an educational musical children’s television program utilizing a talented multinational crew and is a combination of live action, puppetry, and CGI animation.

In 2006, Raymond began working with a touring show called Walking with Dinosaurs on the North American tour. The performance was one of the largest touring shows in the world at the time. “It was like Springsteen, and then U2, and then us,” Raymond told me. The program is based on a BBC television series and incorporates 20 life-size dinosaurs designed by scientists and master puppeteers. It was a huge production with many moving parts, including 25 semi trucks and 75 crew members.

So there he was, 26 years old, traveling and living abroad for an international live performance with life-size dinosaur puppets, working as the head of animatronics puppetry for two years. According to Raymond, the crew referred to the animatronics group as voodoo puppeteers because they operated remotely, he told me with a laugh.

I remarked that 26 is pretty young to have that much responsibility. “Yeah. It was a weird time because I was also the youngest person in my department,” Raymond conceded, “So it got awkward at times.”

Upon his exit from the show, Carr returned to Atlanta and hit the ground running in film and production and started his own production company, Ninja Puppet Productions. You can see some of that work at their website and Facebook. With seemingly limitless energy, he threw himself into theater and film, and recently with his performance partner Raymond Tilton put on a large, successful theater performance called This Darker Life at the Goat Farm’s Gibson Yard in late October.

The show, a performance immersion devised from five original stories, was a coordinated effort with five artists. Among other challenges, Raymond spoke of the logistics that go into a performance that included aerial projections, giant puppets, multiple storylines and locations, and nearly total darkness. Structurally, the performance was unusual in that the 60 person audience sat on a platform in the middle of the room in a spotlight, and the audience’s platform itself rotated periodically to face different playing areas. The action occurred around and throughout the audience, and involved a cast of 10 people.

“That doesn’t really happen very often so we were all just sort of making it up as we went along,” Raymond said, referring to the lazy Susan aspect of the production. “When it works, it’s great… when it doesn’t work it’s just terrifying and awful,” he laughed. “It worked, fortunately, and it was a big success.”

Recently, Raymond also did some work in San Francisco for Dropbox, creating an online recruitment video using puppets. For that campaign, the company interviewed their employees about what it was like to work at Dropbox and then he built puppets based on their mannerisms and features. Unlike the majority of his work, this was building characters based on real people. It would seem that in the line of work that Carr ascribes to there are always new concepts, new ideas, and new challenges.

I also asked Carr about his experiences within the puppeteer community in Atlanta, noting that he was one of the few people I knew who actively worked in that field. His response and breadth of knowledge at once surprised me and was exactly what you would expect from someone like Raymond.

He told me about the variety of roles for puppet workers, including those who like himself work in “muppet style… which is what you’d consider traditional style puppetry,” as well as children’s performers, the puppet slam network, puppetry for film and television, late night adult puppet shows, the Dragon*Con puppet track, and the local theater community such as Dad’s Garage whose performances often incorporate puppetry.

“We’re a pretty tight-knit and inclusive community,” Raymond said.

You may have seen SpeakerBot at the Goat Farm this Halloween, or maybe you ran into the hulking Space Man from last year’s celebration or during the Lantern Parade, or perhaps you’ve seen some extra large marine life puppets hanging around the aquarium- however you come across Raymond Carr and his work, you’re not likely to forget the experience.

Check out his Facebook page and website to keep in the loop about upcoming events and performances!

-Is

Isadora Pennington

Photographer // Writer // Arts Advocate // Community Organizer

Reflecting on 2025

Creative Spaces: Raymond Carr