An active member of UNIMA, the European Centre for Figure Theatre is located in a former Carmelite convent in the heart of the historic 17th century district of Ghent (Belgium). It is a permanent space for exchanges between the Netherlands puppet theatre companies, between artists, the public and the international world of puppets, objects and masks. The EFTC offers a library, a video library, a poster collection, and archives. It regularly organizes thematic exhibitions, touring or on-site, also shows and other activities. The Centre awards two annual prizes: the international Figurentheatergrafiek award and the Luc Vincent prize, awarded to the best show of the street festival, the International Puppetbuskersfestival, which has taken place every year since 1989 alongside the other Ghent festivals, with performances in the city and in the courtyard of the Centre.

From 1993 to 2003, the Centre published five editions a year of Figeuro, a journal devoted to the world of puppetry. Freek Neirynck (b.1949), founding father of EFTC in 1989, is the executive coordinator. He is a prolific author of books, articles, plays (thirty-five for puppets), also a radio, television and press journalist. He studied directing and theory of theatre, worked at the National Theatre of Ghent and subsequently specialized in puppets, learning with Frank Oz, Peter Zapletal and Peter Waschinsky, and then with the Bunraku company in Japan. From 1973 to 2004, he was artistic director of Theater Taptoe, dissolved in 2010. Freek Neirynck was the main communicator and editor-in-chief of the Figeuro journal. In 2003, for health reasons, he left his post as coordinator of the Centre but has stayed on to work as an artistic consultant and continues to oversee the festival. Since 2004, Louis Kindt has been Chairman of the Board and Otto van der Mieden (puppeteer and founder-curator of the Poppenspe(e)lmuseum, the Museum of Puppetry of Vorchten, the Netherlands) programmer of the festival.

(See Belgium.)