Our story
It started with one kid in the audience.
A magician and ventriloquist performed at Jimmy Vee’s elementary school when Jimmy was eight years old. By the end of the assembly, he was hooked.
That Christmas, his grandmother bought him a toy ventriloquist dummy from the Sears catalog.
It gave the dream a face. But Jimmy knew this wasn’t like the dummy he saw on stage. That dummy looked alive. He tried to learn the technique but found it complicated to learn.
Ten years looking for the door
Jimmy wanted to learn ventriloquism for the next ten years and could not find a way in.
At eighteen, while attending college and building marionettes in his apartment, he found a puppet cart at the Altamonte Mall. He offered to work there for free. The owner turned out to be a former professional ventriloquist and magician.
When Jimmy asked to be taught, the man pointed him toward the library. Jimmy ended up at the bookstore instead. They did not have it on the shelf. They ordered it, and two weeks later it arrived.
Jimmy learned ventriloquism in a month.
One month to learn it.
Ten years to find the book.
That gap is still one of the clearest explanations for why this Institute exists.
From wanting to working
Once Jimmy found the door, he went through it quickly: birthday parties, libraries, comedy clubs, and a scripted magic‑and‑ventriloquism show that helped pay his way through college.
In 2004, he and Travis Miller started a marketing company in Orlando with two hundred dollars between them.
But ventriloquism never became the old hobby in the attic. Jimmy helped revive the defunct Central Florida Ventriloquist Association, which became the Florida Ventriloquist Association. He built The Dummy Blog, for years one of the largest collections of ventriloquism video online. He joined the Vent Haven Museum Board of Advisors and later led the Vent Haven ConVENTion in 2024 and 2025.
The deeper he went into the field, the clearer the problems became. Important lives and working knowledge were disappearing faster than anybody could record them. And there was no organized, accessible source of ventriloquism history anywhere.
We started by backing unusual talent.
The nonprofit was incorporated in Florida in 2014 to find and support young people with exceptional talents.
The checks paid for real things: Irish dance lessons, karate tuition and competition fees, and the travel that allowed gifted young musicians to perform in Europe. The organization also supported the Jazz Ambassadors, a professional big band that performed free for the community.
The work later expanded into children’s literacy. Jimmy wrote books designed to be performed aloud, and live programs combined those stories with magic, music, and ventriloquism.
The names changed as the work came into focus. The corporation did not. Same organization. Same tax‑exempt status. Same instinct: notice talent and culture that could easily be overlooked, then do something practical about it.
In 2026, that work became the Ventriloquism Institute.
Because the whole thread needed a home.
Ventriloquism has museums that protect remarkable objects. It has conventions that bring the community together. It has clubs, teachers, builders, collectors, and working performers carrying different pieces of the art.
What it has never had is one organization responsible for connecting the pieces: preserving its history, documenting the art while it is still alive, bringing it to the public, and helping the next generation find a way in.
That is our work now.
Not to seal ventriloquism behind glass. To keep it moving.