Well hi! I’m Kira (they/them), and I’m a puppeteer and performing artist. I was born and raised in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. My performing career began at age seven, when I marched up to my mother with an ad for the local community production of Carousel and told her, “We need to go to this.” From there I was hooked, involved with every performance opportunity I could grab in my small northern city.

I graduated with honours from the Canadian College of Performing Arts, and moved out to Toronto in 2011, where I discovered a love for puppetry as Kate Monster/Lucy the Slut in the premiere Canadian cast of Avenue Q. Since then, puppet magic has the central pillar of my career, both onstage and onscreen.

Most notably, I was one of the featured puppeteers for the Jim Henson Company on AppleTV+’s Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock; and you can see and hear me every morning on CBC Kids in Canada as pink kittycat Cottonball, one of the hosts of Studio K. I’ve also puppeteered on Gen V and The Boys, from Amazon Studios, for an IKEA commercial, and in the recent award-winning video for “Out of the Hands of the Wicked,” by The Holy Gasp, for which I served as puppet captain.

As an actor, I cherish fun and imaginative roles. I received a Dora nomination for my turn as the Prince in The Little Prince: Reimagined, an adaptation of the classic book by Puzzle Piece; and during the COVID-19 pandemic worked with my partner Ryan Couldrey on a series of short horror pieces entitled Apartment 416. As a voice artist I’ve loaned my voice to commercials for Tim Hortons, The Bay, Hotels.com, and Preakness Stakes, and dove into video games as the voice of Wanda in Skully. I also provide English voiceover for Silly Paws, a CBC-produced preschool program in American Sign Language.

I also dabble (okay, aggressively dabble) in scriptwriting, and have written scripts for pantomimes, community theatre shows, orchestral performance narration, dance theatre text, short films like The Trainee, and my own solo play Paleoncology, which garned awards and critical acclaim at Fringe festivals across Canada.

My other interests include textile crafting, animated movies, spooky stuff, cats, and books that make me sad.