A recipient of Senior Fellowship in Puppetry from the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, she also received many awards and honors including the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Puppetry, and Padma Shri in arts.
[4] When she came to study, Rao was initially skeptical about whether a middle-class mother who had studied abroad would be suitable for learning puppetry, but later, understanding her interest further, he agreed to teach her how to perform puppet shows and later how to carve wooden puppets.
[5] Later, in 2011,she and her husband conducted a puppet-making workshop in Prague with Miroslav Trejtnar to learn Czech marionette carving, jointing and stringing techniques.
Having practiced Bharatanatyam for years, she has added strings to the legs of some puppets to make them dance.
[5] Anupama has also won the UN Erasmus Mundus Scholarship to teach Indian classical puppetry to postgraduate students, and taught at Polytech Nice Sophia in France, Free University of Brussels, and at University of Paris.
[4][13] She is a visiting faculty of the National Institute of Design, Bengaluru and also TEDx speaker at many universities of India.
[9] Apart from several venues in India, she have also performed puppetry shows at various international festivals in France, Belgium, Morocco, USA and China.