Yaya Coulibaly

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Yaya Coulibaly is a Malian puppet designer, puppeteer and storyteller. He was born on January 2, 1993, in the Bamako region of Mali and comes from a family of puppeteers with Bambara roots. He began learning about puppets at age ten, working with his father. He studied art in Bamako and later trained in puppet theatre in Charleville-Mézières, France. He formed the Sogolon Puppet Troupe and has become a leading custodian of the Bambara puppetry tradition, one of Africa’s oldest and richest puppetry styles. He protects a large collection of family puppets. He says puppets are his life: puppetry is his family’s work and his domain. He created a dynamic puppet theatre that blends West African traditions with Mali’s folk tales, legends, the great epics, colonial history, and modern life. He uses hand puppets, rod puppets, marionettes, masks and live music. The troupe has performed in Europe and the United States, and parts of the puppetry collection have been shown in Germany, South Africa and the USA.