Ten pairs of hands, from the bunraku stage to the television studio, that taught the modern world how to believe in a puppet again.

Puppetry is one of the oldest arts we have, and for most of its history it belonged to the fairground, the temple courtyard, and the nursery. The 20th century changed that. Ancient traditions like Japanese bunraku and Javanese wayang were carried through war and modernization by artists who refused to let them fade, while a new generation argued that a figure of wood, cloth, or foam could hold a stage as seriously as any actor. Then television arrived, and puppets found an audience larger than any theater could seat. By the century’s end a puppet could win a Tony Award, lead an anti-war march, or greet a hundred countries at once through a screen.

This list follows influence rather than fame: each of these ten changed how puppets were built, moved, or understood, and together they cross the whole field, from three-hundred-year-old string and shadow traditions to Broadway and the Muppet studio. We have tried to span continents and forms rather than crown ten variations on the same figure, and we have left room for a discovery or two, artists whose names may be new to you but whose work you have almost certainly felt. They appear in no particular order.

1. Sergei Obraztsov

1901-1992

More than anyone, Obraztsov made puppetry a serious art of the state. The Moscow theater he founded in 1931, still known by his name, gave the Soviet Union a national stage for figures rather than actors and became a model that other countries copied. His 1946 satire “An Unusual Concert,” a mock variety show in which puppets skewered every cliché of bad performing, toured the globe for decades and grew into one of the most performed puppet productions ever staged. He also proved how little a puppet needs, conjuring a whole love affair from two hands and a pair of small round heads. Start with “An Unusual Concert,” where the comedy travels in any language.

2. Josef Skupa

1892-1957

The Czech lands have loved marionettes for centuries, and Skupa gave that tradition its two most beloved faces. He created the pompous, dim-witted father Spejbl around 1920 and, in 1926, the sharp-tongued boy Hurvínek, a father-and-son double act beloved across the country. Under the Nazi occupation Skupa turned their comedy into coded resistance, and he was imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1944 for it. He also led the international puppetry union UNIMA from 1933 until his death, binding the world’s puppeteers into a single community. Start with any Spejbl and Hurvínek sketch: the pair still perform in Prague today.

3. Yoshida Bungoro

1869-1962

In Japanese bunraku, three puppeteers work a single half-life-size figure in full view of the audience, and Bungoro was the supreme master of its most demanding roles: the women. He spent a lifetime coaxing grief, shame, and longing from a carved wooden head that cannot change its expression, so that the smallest tilt reads as heartbreak. Alongside a handful of peers he carried bunraku through the poverty and bombing of the Second World War, when the art came close to vanishing, and lived to see it revered again. His work is a reminder that the oldest puppetry can be the most sophisticated theater in the room. Start with a filmed bunraku classic such as “The Love Suicides at Sonezaki” and watch the women move.

4. Vittorio Podrecca

1883-1959

Podrecca proved that marionettes could be a touring spectacle to rival any opera company. He founded the Teatro dei Piccoli in Rome in 1914 and built a repertoire in which strings performed Mozart, Rossini, and Gluck, the puppets seeming to sing and dance in time with the music. With a company of some two dozen performers and thousands of figures, he crossed the Atlantic again and again, playing tens of thousands of shows across dozens of countries between the wars. For millions, a Podrecca evening was their first taste of both opera and puppet theater at once. Seek out archival film of his marionette divas to see how far a string could carry a joke.

5. Ki Nartosabdo

1925-1985

In Javanese wayang kulit, a lone puppeteer, the dalang, animates dozens of leather shadow figures, voices every character, and cues the gamelan orchestra through an all-night performance. Nartosabdo, a musician who came to puppetry as an outsider without the usual family lineage, used that freedom to modernize the whole form. He wrote new stories rather than only retelling the epics, blended the rival Yogyakarta and Surakarta styles, and folded in music from across Indonesia and beyond, drawing crowds that traditionalists could not. What scandalized the purists is now taught as classic technique. Start with a recording of one of his all-night shadow plays and let the gamelan carry you into the small hours.

6. Li Tian-lu

1910-1998

Taiwanese glove puppetry, budaixi, packs sword fights, romance, and comedy into palm-sized figures worn like a mitten, and Li was its towering modern master. He founded his troupe, whose name translates as “Almost Like Life,” in 1932 and kept the Hokkien-language tradition alive through Japanese wartime censorship that tried to silence it. He became the living memory of an entire art form, and his story reached the world through Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1993 film “The Puppetmaster,” in which Li, then in his eighties, narrates his own life. Start with that film: it is both a history of Taiwan and a portrait of a great puppeteer at work.

7. Burr Tillstrom

1917-1985

Before anyone knew what television was for, Tillstrom showed that a puppet could own it. His “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” which began locally in Chicago in October 1947 and reached a national NBC audience on 12 January 1949, was almost entirely improvised, with the human host Fran Allison chatting live to hand puppets as if to old friends. It became one of the first programs that adults and children watched together and were both charmed by, drawing admirers as unlikely as Orson Welles. Working close to the lens, he grasped before almost anyone that intimacy, not spectacle, was the medium’s gift. Start with the surviving early broadcasts, where a whole comic world runs on nothing but wit and timing.

8. Jim Henson

1936-1990

Henson is the reason a puppet can feel as expressive as a face. Beginning with the local show “Sam and Friends” in 1955, he abandoned the old idea of a puppet booth and treated the camera frame itself as the stage, so his Muppets could look, move, and react like living creatures. He built them from soft foam rather than carved wood, letting a mouth and eyes carry real feeling, and then reached the whole planet, first through “Sesame Street” in 1969 and then “The Muppet Show,” which at its peak was watched in more than a hundred countries. Kermit the Frog, whom he performed himself, may be the most recognized puppet ever made. Start with the first season of “The Muppet Show.”

9. Peter Schumann

Born 1934

Schumann took puppetry out of the theater and into the street as an instrument of protest. Born in Silesia and working in New York, he and his wife Elka founded the Bread and Puppet Theater in 1963, famous for towering papier-mâché figures carried aloft by teams of performers and for the loaves of dark bread shared with the audience after each show. During the Vietnam era his giant, grieving puppets became a fixture of anti-war marches, giving the peace movement some of its most haunting images. He proved that a puppet could be political, monumental, and communal all at once. Start with film of the company’s Vietnam-era processions, then find its summer pageants in rural Vermont, still running today.

10. Julie Taymor

Born 1952

Taymor carried the world’s puppet traditions onto the biggest commercial stage there is and refused to hide the strings. As a young artist she spent years in Indonesia studying wayang shadow play and topeng masked dance, and she wove those lessons into “The Lion King,” which opened on Broadway in 1997. Her radical choice was to let the audience see the human performer inside every mask and puppet, so the effort of bringing an animal to life becomes part of the beauty. For that production she became the first woman to win the Tony Award for directing a musical. Start with the opening “Circle of Life,” when the savanna fills with visibly handmade creatures and the theater gasps anyway.

Final thoughts

What links a bunraku heroine, a Javanese shadow, and a foam-rubber frog is the same quiet miracle: an inert object that an audience agrees to treat as alive. Across the 20th century these ten kept renewing that agreement, some by guarding traditions centuries old, others by carrying the art onto television, into the protest march, or under the proscenium arch of a Broadway house. Between them they show that puppetry is not a children’s diversion but one of theater’s most flexible languages, at home in a temple courtyard and a global broadcast alike.

As always, a list of ten leaves worthy figures in the wings. Tony Sarg, who designed the first giant balloons for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and helped revive the American marionette, could easily have claimed a place, as could the French artist Philippe Genty, whose dreamlike visual theater pushed the puppet toward pure poetry. Treat these ten as an invitation rather than a verdict, and if one tradition here is unfamiliar, follow it. You can explore more of how these living crafts took shape in our puppetry and traditions pillar guides across CreARTivity.

Corrected on 2 October 2026. An earlier version of this article said that Kukla, Fran and Ollie reached a national American audience from 1947. The correct information is that the show began locally in Chicago in October 1947 and reached a national NBC audience on 12 January 1949.

Sources consulted

Wikipedia, Kukla, Fran and Ollie