Story Teller
Vanessa Ellis is a puppeteer, choreographer, designer, and maker whose practice lives at the intersection of movement, material, and myth. Working across theatre, film, and television, she creates visually driven worlds where story is carried through the body, the object, and the unseen thread between them.
Portfolio
Beginning her creative life in dance, Vanessa shifted into puppetry in 1998 and has spent more than 25 years devising, constructing, and performing puppetry in its many forms. Her independent work draws deeply from mythology and folklore, weaving together dance, puppetry, and visual storytelling to create work that is tactile, intimate, and richly physical.
Her design language is grounded in soft sculptural forms and hand-built elements—objects shaped by touch as much as by intention. Cloth, fibre, and texture guide her process, and in recent years her making has increasingly embraced earth-friendlier practices: upcycling materials, hand-dyeing, and felting natural fibres, allowing the history of materials to remain present in the work.
Vanessa’s collaborative practice has taken her to festivals and stages around the world, performing with puppets ranging from the miniature to the monumental. Her experience spans rod, tabletop, shadow, glove, marionette, animatronic (film and arena), roving, and body puppetry—each form offering its own relationship between breath, weight, and movement.
Her performance credits include two years as a Voodoo animatronics puppeteer on Walking with Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular, touring internationally across the UK, Europe, Australia, and Asia. She has designed and fabricated puppets for the award-winning series No Stings Attached (Green Bean Pictures) and worked as a puppeteer and maker with Victorian Opera, Opera Australia, Windmill Performing Arts, Patch Theatre Company, Terrapin Theatre, Polyglot Theatre, Black Hole Theatre, and Puppet Vision. She has also worked as a full-time maker in the Skins Department at The Creature Technology Company and contributed to the Moomba Parade through the construction of costumes and floats.
In 2006, Vanessa assisted puppetry director Peter Wilson on the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony and later completed a nine-week masterclass with French directors Philippe Genty and Mary Underwood, culminating in a public performance season—an experience that continues to inform her approach to poetic, image-led theatre.
Vanessa Ellis 