Jenny is a director, designer and puppeteer and co-founder/artistic director of the OBIE winning Great Small Works visual theater collective.
She is music director of Jennifer Miller’s CIRCUS AMOK and artist in residence at Milk Not Jails and Inside Change. With Great Small Works, Romaine performs, teaches, and directs in theaters, schools, parks, libraries, museums, prisons, street corners, and other public spaces, producing work on many scales, from gigantic outdoor spectacles with scores of participants, to miniature shows in living rooms. She has directed and designed community based spectacles for numerous projects in New York City and around the world.
Romaine was a sound archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for 13 years and for several decades has drawn on Yiddish/Pan Jewish primary source materials to create art that has contemporary meaning.
She was the first recipient of the Adrienne Cooper Award for Dreaming in Yiddish (2014), received a Marshall Meyer Risk-Taker Award from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (2015) and is featured in "Dazzle Camouflage: Spectacular Theatrical Strategies for Resistance and Resilience" a monograph by Ezra Berkley Nepon. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the Pratt Institute department of Performance Studies.
