Founder
Jimmy Vee
He has been doing this since he was eight years old, which is the only qualification that really matters here: he is not an academic who discovered ventriloquism. He is a ventriloquist who decided somebody had better write it down.
His grandmother handed him a ventriloquist puppet when he was eight. She thought it would be funny. It turned into birthday parties, then libraries, then comedy clubs, then a scripted magic-and-ventriloquism show that paid his way through college by charging more than anyone else charged and getting booked more often anyway.
He went into advertising, and in 2004 started a marketing company in Orlando with Travis Miller and two hundred dollars. He has written business books that sold well and children’s books that get read twice in one night. Somewhere in the middle of all that he became a collector, then a chronicler, and then the person the field calls when nobody can remember who built something.
The books
Eight picture books, written to be performed — read out loud, with voices, to a child who will ask for them again before bed. That is not incidental to the Institute’s literacy work. It is the same craft: hold the room, make them laugh, and the words go in.
In the field
Vent Haven ConVENTion — Executive Director, 2024–2025, running the world’s longest-running gathering of ventriloquists. Before that, three years working the convention alongside Mark Wade, who had run it for twenty-three.
Vent Haven Museum — Board of Advisors from 2021.
Florida Ventriloquist Association — founder. He ran the meetings out of his own house before there was anywhere else to hold them.
The Dummy Blog — for years the largest collection of ventriloquism video anywhere online, and the direct ancestor of the archive.
There is no central hub dedicated to ventriloquism’s past, present and future. There is no thread that holds the three together. We are building that string.Jimmy Vee