Margareta Niculescu

Margareta Niculescu (born January 4, 1926 in Iaşi, Romania) is a Romanian artist, puppeteer, director, teacher and theater director. She contributed to the renewal, since 1950s, of the art of puppetry in Europe and the rest of the world. She was director of Tandarica Theatre of Bucharest. From 2000 until 2004 she was president of the International Puppetry Association in Charleville-Mezieres, in Ardennes, and co-founded with Jacques Felix, the National School of Puppetry Arts in that city. In 1978 she won the Erasmus Prize together with other noted puppeteers Yves Joly, Peter Schumann and the Napoli brothers.

While working as an independent journalist, Niculescu discovered a puppetry troupe that considered its art theatrical and directed accordingly its projects. The puppet theater at that time was neither structured nor professionalized in Romania; instead small groups of artists drew their characters from folk tradition.

At the same era, the Romanian Communist Party took power and abolished the monarchy, proclaiming the People's Republic of Romania on December 30, 1947. The Party then created a new network of cultural institutions controlled by the state. As part of this effort, Niculescu was invited by the Romanian Ministry of Culture to help bring puppetry to a new level as national theater. In this new field Niculescu began studies at the Institute of Theater and Film Art (IATC) in Bucharest, and then became director at the Tandarica Theater of Bucharest. At that time she was 23 years old and remained in this position from 1949 to 1986. As director, she received the Erasmus Prize on behalf of the group in 1978, when it was recognized for being "a colourful and imaginative theatre that has had a fertile influence on post-war puppetry".

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