On March 21, 2024, celebrated as World Puppetry Day, Yale Child Study Center (YCSC) Professor Kasia Chawarska along with Senior Research Scientist Suzanne Macari and colleagues received the 2024 Nancy Staub Publications Award for excellence in writing on the art of puppetry.
The Nancy Staub Award is given by the United States Center of Union Internationale de la Marionnette (UNIMA-USA), the North American Center of the oldest international theatre organization in the world. This is one of the first puppetry awards given for a scientific paper involving clinical child populations.
Macari was notified in February that a paper she and Chawarska co-authored, Puppets facilitate attention to social cues in children with ASD, was selected for the award, which is named in honor of Nancy Lohman Staub, an original member of UNIMA-USA.
Published in Autism Research in 2021, the article was written about a research study led by Chawarska and made possible by a collaboration conceived by Chawarska with Fred Volkmar, Irving B. Harris Professor Emeritus, and Cheryl Henson of the Henson Foundation.
As noted in the award letter, “The award is meant to honor books, articles, or dissertations which are exemplary contributions that forward the field of puppetry by documenting important histories, contributing importantly to theory or practice, and by sharing prime research. Our award committee found your work a significant addition to the literature on puppetry and performing objects.”
The paper’s authors also include YCSC Associate Research Scientist Angelina Vernetti and Joseph Chang, James A. Attwood Professor of Statistics & Data Science at Yale, as well as several Yale students and members of the YCSC Social and Affective Neuroscience of Autism (SANA) lab.