Maria Herbert-Liew is a wooden marionette maker and illustrator based in Largs, North Ayrshire. Her journey into the craft began in 2006 when Royal De Luxe brought their giant street marionettes to London for The Sultan's Elephant, an experience she describes as pure magic. After years working as a children's book illustrator, Maria felt drawn to a more tactile, embodied practice and began training in marionette making, studying with Bernd Ogrodnik, Oliver Hymans at the Little Angel Theatre, and John Roberts, one of the remaining masters still teaching in the UK. The two practices remain deeply connected for her: both begin with pencil, paper and imagination, and both use visual language to tell stories, to exaggerate, characterise and move with rhythm and feeling.

Maria's work is rooted in a belief that marionettes can speak honestly about the full range of human experience, from everyday humour to the most profound and difficult things, in a way that transcends language and ego. She values the form's ability to communicate powerfully without words, reaching people across the barriers that verbal language can sometimes create. She is not interested in nostalgia or retelling old stories in old ways. Her ambition is to bring marionettes forward, making work that reflects the diverse, complicated and beautiful world we actually live in, and to become a pathfinder in what she sees as a genuine revival of the form.bring presence, harmony, and visual impact to space.