Nashville is a city full of young women who sing beautifully and long to do it for a living. Megan Piphus Peace could easily join their ranks, wrapping her shining soprano around gospel and R&B melodies. But when she sings, her lips stay still, and the song spills out (it seems) from the fuzzy mouth of an adorable puppet moving expressively at the end of her arm. Not just another Nashville singer, Peace is a ventriloquist puppeteer who sings. That unusual mix of talent brought her to Sesame Street and the character Gabrielle in 2020 as the show’s first female Black puppeteer.
“It was a calling for me,” Peace says about pursuing a somewhat unusual creative path. She’s being literal about the spiritual foundation of her work. A Cincinnati pastor’s daughter, Peace fell in love with puppetry as a child.
“One of the women in our church wanted to start a children’s ministry and put together a puppetry team to teach the children,” Peace says. “She got about 20 of us [children] together and drove us to the International Festival of Christian Puppetry. We didn’t even have puppets yet! We had nothing but t-shirts that said we were a team called ZAP for Zion’s Anointed Puppets.” The team took classes in stage puppetry and got to see puppetry ventriloquism performances. Peace, who was seeing live puppetry ventriloquism for the first time, was enchanted by all of it.
“I saw these women performing on stage with their puppets, and they weren’t moving their lips, so it made it seem like the puppets were real,” Peace recalls. “I fell into the magic, and my imagination ran wild. They sang songs — and I already loved to sing — and they told Bible stories using their characters. It was such beautiful storytelling, and it made me believe in that magic. I was inspired and wanted to make others feel how they made me feel.
“I went home and told my parents I was going to be a puppeteer and ventriloquist, and they were like, okay, but you still need to go to college.”
Her mom tracked down some VHS ventriloquism tutorials through the local library, and Peace began to study what would become a life-long passion.
“To do ventriloquism, there are certain letters of the alphabet that you have to close your mouth for but a lot that you don’t,” Peace explains. “You don’t have to close your mouth to say the letter D, so you replace the letter B with the letter D and just flick your tongue a little differently to sound like the letter B. I learned that trick pretty quickly, and then I got out my puppet and learned the coordination it takes, not moving my lips and moving the puppet, but it took a while to fine-tune those skills. I did a lot of mirror practice. Then I went back to the conference the next year and took classes.”
Speaking through a puppet helped Peace find her authentic, personal voice. “I had just changed schools and had to make all new friends, and I was already a shy kid, and it was hard for me to open up in a completely new environment,” she explains. So she brought her puppets to school and began entertaining and interacting with her classmates through them. “I found my voice by projecting through other characters and replaying things I had witnessed. I was imitating what I had seen in life through my characters.”
Her first official performance came at age 10 when her teachers asked her to demonstrate her puppetry skills at the school’s devotional. “I don’t know what inspired me to do it, but in my ten-year-old mind, I said, ‘I’m not gonna go up there and just say a few words; I gotta give a show!’” Peace says. “That was one of the most memorable experiences of my life because I saw how mesmerized the children were, from pre-K to fifth grade. I had their attention the entire time. If the principal had gotten up and spoken, they might not have paid attention so intently. I learned I could teach them at another level with a puppet involved.”
Teaching children through puppetry became Peace’s mission. “I’m glad that at such a young age. I felt a calling towards it; otherwise, I could have given in to people saying, ‘Oh, just put the puppets down and be a singer.’ But I really did feel a special mission of using puppetry to teach children.”
“I really want my children to see me pursuing the career of my dreams.” — Meagan Piphus Peace
Peace and her puppets performed for audiences at schools, daycares, churches, civic groups, and conferences throughout her middle and high school years. After graduating with honors from Vanderbilt University with a graduate degree in Finance, she worked in real estate finance and development in Nashville while continuing to perform with her puppets and creating new characters.
The business and creative sides of her talents would eventually unite when a University of Cincinnati economics professor reached out to her for help in developing a financial literacy curriculum for children. “In that moment, all the pieces came together,” Peace says. “I said, ‘OK, I can use my knowledge in finance to teach kids with puppets about complicated concepts like supply and demand, and the difference between a good and a service, and how to make a budget.’”
In 2018, she connected through Instagram with puppeteer Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, who plays Abby Cadabby on Sesame Street. After seeing videos of Peace’s work online, Carrara-Rudolph offered to send along some of Peace’s videos to the show’s producers. The two kept in touch, and Peace stayed hopeful for an opportunity, though nothing was guaranteed.
In March 2020, Peace received an email from Sesame Street producer Matt Vogel and puppet captain Marty Robinson. Even though she wasn’t a traditional puppeteer and was more of a ventriloquist, the producers thought she could learn the skills needed to join them on Sesame Street.
“We traded videos back and forth of me doing Muppet-style puppetry so that I could get feedback,” Peace says. “I had to learn how to use the monitor they use to see themselves in the camera frame, and they invited me to join the Sesame Street mentorship program for puppeteers, where you can study under the greats. They give you regular feedback on your puppetry and allow you to perform on screen. I thought I would be in the mentorship program for six or seven years before my first recording opportunity. But my first opportunity came up a few months later, in June of 2020, for the CNN town hall on racism in response to the George Floyd protest. I was the voice of Gabrielle in that town hall. And I recorded for the first time in person with Sesame Street in September of 2021.”
Gabrielle, Peace’s signature character on Sesame Street, is a 6-year-old Black girl Muppet who “is kind and sweet and thinks of self and community,” as Peace says. “Sesame Street has been extremely progressive in presenting the storylines to children and translating what is happening in the world to the Street so that children can understand it. Gabrielle has been incorporated more into the Street in response to a lot of what happened in 2020 regarding Civil Rights. Sesame Street realized, ‘Hey, we have to have diverse representation not just in our human characters, but in our puppets,’”
Peace notes the previous lack of representation wasn’t entirely Sesame Street’s failing; after all, there probably aren’t a whole lot of Black female ventriloquist puppeteers. “I can count them on one hand, at least the ones I know of,” she says.
These days Peace splits her time between Nashville and the historic Kaufmann-Astoria studio in Queens, where Sesame Street is filmed, flying up once a month to record there and doing additional voiceover work locally at Digital Audio Post on Music Row. She still dabbles in real estate investment, but her real priorities are her family and puppetry, both of which are full-time jobs.
“I made the big decision to go full-time last August when I saw that I could do this work and have family balance too,” Peace says. “I really want my children to see me pursuing the career of my dreams.” Her preschooler sons, Tyson and Leo, know she’s hanging out on Sesame Street because she got them Face Timing with Elmo, but they haven’t made the connection that she’s Gabrielle.
“They know my characters are puppets because they’ve seen me moving them, but they haven’t met Gabrielle in person yet. I have a practice puppet at home, but she doesn’t look much like the real Gabrielle. They’ve only seen her on television. One night we were shooting late at the studio and had a little break, so I got on FaceTime with Gabrielle, and she said, ‘Hi Tyson and Leo, I’m here with your Mommy,’ and Leo said, ‘Where’s Elmo?’ So that was special,” Peace says. Laughing.
