"To gain is to give, to give is to gain.” Regina Foo was struck by this line spoken by Grace Kalaiselvi in Cloud Messenger (2014), a multilingual, interdisciplinary production devised with graduating ITI students. This inspired Regina Foo to pursue acting at ITI. Years later, it has become the guiding principle of her work as an arts practitioner.

Since graduating in 2017, Regina’s career has been anything but conventional—her range spans from puppetry and theatre for young audiences (TYA) to independent theatremaking and facilitating social art projects. Today, much of Regina’s practice centres on socially engaged and community arts. She works with children, seniors and people with disabilities to create arts programmes that encourage play, ignite imagination and help people express themselves.

Her path into socially engaged arts began with Both Sides Now, a community arts project that continually engages the public on end-of-life issues, which she developed with Drama Box and ArtsWok back in 2012. It was her first experience with storytelling and performance beyond the traditional stage. Since then her role has evolved: she is less often a performer now and more a facilitator, helping others to discover and share their own narratives. In 2025, she collaborated with director Jeffrey Tan to work with seniors, using puppetry to help them tell their stories.

Earlier in her community arts journey, she met Grace Lee-Khoo, founder of Access Path Productions, who introduced her to accessibility arts and people with physical and intellectual disabilities. The experience required Regina to rethink everything she knew about performance. Conventional theatre training, she realised, wasn’t enough. She recalled her training with former ITI lecturer Beto Ruiz, also an ITI alumnus from the class of 2008. She drew on core acting principles she learnt from him, like the process of PRAR—perceiving, receiving, being affected, responding—and used these skills to connect with participants in new ways. She now continues this work as Associate Artist at Access Path Productions.

Regina has always drawn on her acting training to shape her artistic practice in puppetry and storytelling. The skills she gained while learning traditional art forms—the water sleeves and spear work of Beijing opera; the masks of Japanese noh theatre that require actors to focus their energy—prepared her to work with puppets and bring inanimate objects to life. And she brings these skills to her role as education and outreach trainer at Paper Monkey Theatre, a bilingual puppetry theatre that advocates Asian values and culture.

One of her favourite performances she has created is Catch a Breath! (2022), an Esplanade PLAYtime! production for children aged 3–6 which she directed and performed in. Working with fellow ITI alumni Sonia Kwek and Tan Wei Ying, Regina created a non-verbal work using just the body and breath to translate ideas into performance. It was revolutionary in its simplicity and unconventional for a children’s production. In her TYA work, she continues to explore how young audiences can be empowered to have a sense of agency in storytelling.

For Regina, what matters most is creating space in society for more than just the functional and economical. She says,