Meet the Board.

Jimmy Vee

President · Director

Jimmy Vee is a ventriloquist, magician, children’s author, entrepreneur, and founder of the Ventriloquism Institute.

He served as Executive Director of the Vent Haven ConVENTion in 2024 and 2025 after three years working alongside Mark Wade. He joined the Vent Haven Museum Board of Advisors in 2021 and helped revive the organization now known as the Florida Ventriloquist Association.

Jimmy has written ten children’s books and built the Archive that became the Institute’s flagship preservation project. He holds an MA in organizational management.

He brings the founding vision and the responsibility for turning it into working programs. More about Jimmy →

Mark Wade

Director

Mark Wade is an internationally known ventriloquist, children’s entertainer, educator, and teacher of performers.

He led the Vent Haven ConVENTion for twenty‑five consecutive years and chaired it thirty‑one times, more than anybody else in its history. He is now director emeritus and has been part of every ConVENTion since the event began.

Mark and his wife, Jody, took responsibility for Maher Ventriloquist Studios after the death of Clinton Detweiler and later passed it to Tom Crowl, helping keep the Maher Course available to another generation of students. He has served on the Vent Haven Museum Board of Advisors since that board was formed.

He brings a lifetime of knowledge about the art, teaching, children’s entertainment, and the community that carries ventriloquism forward.

Allen J. Venezio, MME

Director

Allen J. Venezio is a professional jazz trumpet player, author, and music educator with more than thirty years of experience in classrooms and on bandstands.

He is Director of Bands and Associate Professor of Music at the College of Central Florida, where he directs the Wind Ensemble, Patriot Jazz Ensemble, and Brass Ensemble and teaches music theory. He is the author of Trumpet 101.

Allen founded the Same Is Lame Jazz Ambassadors in 2015 and remains the ensemble’s music director and lead trumpet. The organization supported the group’s free public performances for years.

A director since the nonprofit was formed in 2014, Allen brings practical experience in arts education, public performance, and building programs that give young people somewhere to grow. Photo: Maggie Studios

Terry Fator

Advisor

Terry Fator is a singer, impressionist, and ventriloquist, and the performer who put the art back in front of a mass American audience.

He found a book on ventriloquism when he was ten and bought his first figure, a Willie Talk, for ten dollars at Sears. He got Walter T. Airedale on his eighteenth birthday and still works him. Then came roughly twenty‑five years of fairs, churches, corporate dates, and opening slots.

He won America’s Got Talent in 2007, took a headline residency on the Las Vegas Strip, and played his one thousandth show at the Mirage in 2013. Forbes has listed him among the highest paid comedians in the country.

He also changed the shape of the opportunity for everyone behind him. By Paul Zerdin’s account, the show’s producers had no plan for what to do with a winning ventriloquist until Fator asked for a Las Vegas show, and a residency became what winners got.

He brings the view from the biggest room this art has ever played, and the proof that a ventriloquist can headline one.

Ronn Lucas

Advisor

Ronn Lucas is a ventriloquist and comedian, and one of the most decorated stage performers the art has produced.

He was appearing in a Broadway show before he ever attended a ventriloquist convention. He has been a repeat guest on The Tonight Show and appeared on Night Court and L.A. Law, working with Scorch the dragon, Billy, and, famously, nothing at all but his own hand.

He was the first ventriloquist to headline a long‑running show in Las Vegas, which is the door Terry Fator later walked through. Atlantic City Magazine named him Entertainer of the Year, and in 2005 the Smothers Brothers presented him with the Askins Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to the ventriloquial art.

He brings command of the fundamentals at the highest level the trade has, and a lifetime of knowing what a room will and will not accept.

Bob Abdou

Advisor

Bob Abdou, known in the business as Mr. Puppet, is a full‑time working ventriloquist and one of the art’s most active teachers.

He got here the long way. He ran a printing company in Atlanta that grew to fifteen employees and ten presses before it came apart. Then he volunteered as a weekend house greeter at the Center for Puppetry Arts for three years, with no experience, to find out what kind of ventriloquist he could be. He has been full‑time since 1996 and, by his own count, has performed more than 7,600 shows, rebuilding the business from scratch in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Austin, Columbus, and now Hilton Head Island.

He received the W.S. Berger Distinguished Service Award in 2014. He is the Puppeteers of America’s consultant for ventriloquism and a correspondent for The Puppetry Journal, wrote the “Ask the Pro” column for Ventriloquist Central, and made the Tidbit in a Minute lesson series. Every July, during the Vent Haven ConVENTion, he takes a group of ventriloquists to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital to perform for the patients. He has done that every year since 2003, and at Shriners for three years before that.

He brings the working life, a private collection, and a habit of mentoring one performer at a time. One of them opens his shows and learned the art from a copy of How to Make Your Sock Talk that Bob put in his hands.

Jeff Goltz

Advisor

Jeff Goltz is a stand‑up comedy ventriloquist, figure maker, and educator.

He started performing at talent shows at seven and went to work at Peewinkle’s Puppet Studio in Indianapolis at nine. He came to his first Vent Haven ConVENTion at ten and has not missed one since. He builds his own figures by hand, and he did a full year of straight stand‑up comedy before he ever brought a puppet on stage.

He is the ConVENTion’s Open Mic Director and teaches at Junior Vent University alongside Lynn Trefzger and Megan Hall. He began in puppetry with Peewinkle’s Puppet Studio and the Melchior Marionettes, and his design work has been staged professionally, including a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Key West whose director, Richard Ericson, called him “a gifted artist.”

He brings the young end of the art. He is also what the Institute’s programs are trying to produce: a kid who carried a figure he had built himself into the ConVENTion hotel lobby to show the veterans, and who now runs the room he came up in.

Chance Wolf

Advisor

Chance Wolf is a figure maker and the owner of Wolf’s Magic.

He got his first figure, a Jerry Mahoney, at twelve, the same year magic got hold of him. What followed was forty years of paid drawing: sign painter, commercial artist, comic book inker, then builder of magic apparatus. He founded Wolf’s Magic in 2003 with his wife Shelley.

He is known for mechanics. Controls that are precise and compact, with nothing visible that should not be. His custom figures start at ten thousand dollars and are designed, sculpted, and fabricated in his own shop.

He brings the maker’s side of this art. That is the least documented part of the field, and the part the Archive most needs someone who can read.

Mike Palma

Advisor

Mike Palma is a ventriloquist and figure maker in Ocala, Florida.

He built his first figure at eighteen out of plastic wood and did his first show at nineteen. He has been performing and building ever since, for audiences that include corporate rooms for Snap‑on Tools and the LPGA, and he lectures on figure mechanics to anyone who wants to learn them.

Jeff Duckworth calls him “a master builder, and one heck of a ventriloquist.” Bob Conrad called him “a great craftsman and artist” whose painting “is a work of art in itself.”

He brings both halves of the art at once, the performing and the building, from about an hour up the road.

Trish Dunn

Advisor

Trish Dunn is a comedy ventriloquist working on both sides of the Atlantic, and the founder of Women In Ventriloquism, which gathers female ventriloquists from around the world.

She started with a Simon Says dummy her parents ordered out of the Sears catalog. In 2004 she left her previous career to do this full time. She is self‑taught, which is the ordinary way into this art and the reason she is so direct about teaching it.

She publishes plain instruction on the mechanics: which letters are labial, where the tongue goes for a B or an F or a W, and the practice method of recording yourself and then watching it back with the sound off to catch a lip that moves. She also builds teaching shows for children, and founded GTown Comics, a comedy coaching group, in Gastonia, North Carolina.

She brings the room where the women in this art find each other, and a teacher’s habit of giving the method away instead of guarding it.

Steve Hewlett

Advisor

Steve Hewlett is a British comedy ventriloquist and writer.

He was roadying for Joe Pasquale at about fifteen, triggering the sound tapes during the act. He became a finalist on Britain’s Got Talent, where David Walliams told him “I love the scripts, they are so witty. Your ventriloquism is incredible but you’re so funny with it!” He is a member of the Grand Order of Water Rats, hosts the Thursford Christmas Spectacular, and works the ships and the Warner houses through most of the year.

He also spent five years building something the rest of this field did not. Eyes and Teeth, his podcast, ran to 214 episodes across sixteen seasons between 2020 and 2025: roughly 219 hours of working comedians and variety performers talking about the job, including Sir Ken Dodd and Paul Daniels.

He brings a comedy writer’s ear, and an oral history of British variety recorded while the people in it were still here to give it.

Peter Michaels Jr.

Archivist

Peter Michaels Jr. is a musician, songwriter, and multi‑instrumentalist based in New York City.

He grew up inside this art. His father, Pete Michaels, is a two‑time recipient of the W.S. Berger Distinguished Service Award, and Peter was performing at the Vent Haven ConVENTion as a boy, described there in 2006 as a rising star.

Guitar has been his main instrument since he was eight, alongside bass, drums, piano, mandolin, ukulele, and sitar. He has released his own music since 2018 and served as music director and slap upright bassist for the first touring company of the Johnny Cash Official Concert Experience.

He supervises the music for the Vent Haven ConVENTion, giving that time in his father’s legacy, and serves the Institute as its archivist.