Chris Fitch is a sculptor and inventor in the Boston area. Beyond his work in sculpture, his creative reach has touched upon stop motion animation, science museum exhibits, design of teaching tools for science and math education, and independent invention. Most recently he completed an electronic sculpture for the Inventions Gallery at the Hartford Science Center. He also recently appeared with a state of the art miniature puppet theater he created for a touring production of Peter and the Wolf, first performed in 2008 at Walt Disney Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. On the heels of that performance, he continued his exploration of new forms of puppetry for Stravinsky’s Petrouchka with the University of Maryland Symphony and for a production of Brecht’s Life of Galileo with MIT and the Underground Railway Theater. It is safe to say that the arc of his professional trajectory has been more like a giant squiggle than an arc. He has engineered and built automated production machines for a toy factory, run an “emergency amusement” company with his brother, building things like a giant fly that exploded through the wall of a nightclub and zoomed around the ceiling at 25 mph, or staging things like a shark attack at a fancy restaurant. He led the model and stopmotion puppet making division of a major animation company for six years, designed a physics playground, hit the streets of France with a two-man junk band with instruments made from French trash, has designed landscapes, built outdoor fountains, designed residential furniture and lighting, built architectural models, studied music in West Africa, invented fasteners, toys, and armature systems for the animation industry, done some (nonunion) screen acting, built chain-reaction Rube Goldberg installations, and conducted workshops about kinematics and foam latex stop motion puppetry. He has also eaten tarantulas and scorpions, sea centipedes, hammerhead sharks, roasted locusts, and other experimental foods, chased a solar eclipse across the Peruvian high desert, co-owned a tree house bed-and-breakfast inn in the Philippines, collected jungle orchids in southeast Asia, spelunked underground rivers with nothing but a flashlight, and can throat sing like a Tuvan cowboy.
Sign up here!
WHS Learning Commons 