Tara Cooper In her 25 years as a professional makeup, hair, mask, wig, and puppet artist and designer, Tara Cooper has worked on productions large and small – from collaborating with A-list directors and celebrities, building wigs for a myriad of theatrical, film, print, and commercial productions, to teaching makeup, SPFX, and wig design courses at multiple universities and beauty schools – she’s also been a multi-medium artist her entire life. She works primarily in carving wood as well as pen and ink illustration, with a little sculpting and painting mixed in on the side. Most of her work has evolved from her lifetime love for all things creature, circus, fantasy, and vaudeville. Whimsy yet dark; childlike innocence juxtaposed along a funhouse underbelly – Tara is always trying to capture a lighter world that offers a temporary escape to the one that we’re all currently living in. She learned wood carving techniques and marionette puppetry while staying in Prague, mask making at UT, and her love of illustration came from her mother being a mixed media folk artist and illustrator when she was growing up. Her work has been temporarily installed at the original Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, NM, and she participated in the local Austin Creature Show on South Congress for a decade. She also released a successful coloring book in 2020 called Curious Sightings of Peculiar Beings.