AgostinoArts - About Us

Agostino Arts is the operating name for Agostino & Co. Performing Arts, a partnership under the direction of Christopher Agostino and Lorraine Zeller. We joined forces in the late ‘80’s when Lorraine was a movement theatre artist touring her one-woman show in schools and theatres and Christopher was a facepainter and a performer in the NY clown-theatre scene. We fell in love and were married. We continued with our own successful careers and gradually began to combine our efforts to produce greater results.

Lorraine has extensive experience performing in schools and creating theatre with kids. She was a co-founder and past director of Touchstone, a theatre company based in Bethlehem, PA, with which she toured across the US, Mexico and Great Britain.

Portrait of Lorraine the face painting artist

Portrait of Christopher the face painting artist

Christopher is both a visual and performing artist. He was a graphic artist for a silk screen studio, creates the masks and painted props for our shows, and makes ceramic sculptures for our house. His 25 years on stage began with an arts-in-education company and includes a broad range of skills from physical comedy to writing and creating original theatre.

About the Work

Agostino & Co. Performing Arts presents exciting, innovative performances and entertainment for family audiences. We employ storytelling, movement, clowning, masks and costumes, sound and text, and "Transformation! Facepainting" to create original theatre which is both thought-provoking and entertaining for schools, theatres and events. Our "Transformation! Artists" are regularly seen at events and parties throughout the New York area turning thousands of people each year into fantastic works of art.

"Transformation! Facepainting" is our term for the make-up technique developed by Christopher Agostino when he began facepainting in 1976. By combining the application methods of a theatrical make-up artist with water-based facepaints, he created a way to quickly "transform" a face — painting a person’s whole face in just a few minutes to turn them into an animal, clown, monster or anything the artist can imagine. His background in graphic arts led to a bold sense of design. His fascination with the transforming effect of make-up led to his exploration of the uses of masks and body art in world cultures. Together these techniques and influences have led to the dynamic, mask-like style we call "Transformation! Facepainting".

To expand the effect beyond individual faces to entire events we developed our company of facepainting artists. During the past twenty years many visual and performing artists have contributed to the "Transformation!" style. We look at our work as a modern attempt at a fundamental human art — the universal act of changing identity through masks and body art as seen in tribal cultures. One of the qualities that makes us human is our ability to become something different by changing our appearance to reflect our dreams and our world. Our company brings this interactive art to public events and private parties, letting people become whatever they might wish they could be. The images we paint are drawn from nature and our imaginations, influenced by mask and make-up designs of world cultures. Each face we paint is created as a unique work of living art, transforming the wearer into someone new and different. We especially enjoy watching some people become the face they are wearing: children roaring like lions and their parents roaring back.

The concept of transformation is a thread which runs through our theatre and school programs as well. Our company’s butterfly logo comes from our signature performance, "In Search of Wings", in which a bookworm dreams of becoming a butterfly and is transformed into one on stage. In Christopher’s "Heads & Tales" series he combines storytelling with his facepainting to change audience members into the characters of his original stories and folktales. And in our most popular school show, "The Bodacious Book Show", the excitement of classic children’s books comes alive onstage when the audience becomes the performers and everyone is involved in the adventure.

In addition to our own productions we are proud to include on our roster the shows of some of our long time associates in the family entertainment field. We have long admired the ability of David Levitan and Ned Gelfars to entertain the adults in their audiences, as well as the children. We are especially pleased to have added this year "The Fun Show", a playful performance by our mentor and dear friend, Sigfrido Aguilar, a master clown from Mexico.