SESAME STREET puppeteer Megan Piphus credits a childhood church puppet ministry — and one Bible verse pinned above her desk during the leanest years of her career — with leading her to the role that made her the show’s first Black woman puppeteer.
“I believe that God’s timing is perfect and divine. I knew very early that I had a calling to teach kids about God’s love,” Piphus said on a new episode of the “Jesus Calling” podcast.
Piphus, a puppeteer and ventriloquist who now voices Gabrielle on SESAME STREET, started performing at age 10, after a Vacation Bible School teacher brought a puppetry conference back to her church and recruited a group of local kids to learn the craft.
She wasn’t a natural extrovert. On the podcast, her puppet sidekick, June Bug, needled her about it directly, joking that Piphus “started talking to puppets because she didn’t have any friends.”
“That’s not true, June Bug,” Piphus shot back, laughing. “I was very shy, and I had a hard time opening up and sharing my voice. So I started talking to the puppets, and I found my voice.”
That early ministry work turned into decades of performing at schools, churches, festivals and nursing homes before SESAME STREET ever entered the picture. Piphus said she grew up watching the show without realizing puppetry was a craft she could learn, and she never expected to land on it herself.
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She sent an audition packet to the Jim Henson Company in 2017 despite the company’s website stating it wasn’t accepting submissions. Three years passed with no response — until 2020, when a SESAME STREET producer found her letter during a pandemic shutdown and invited her into the show’s mentorship program. Within three months, she won the role of Gabrielle.
During one discouraged stretch before that breakthrough, Piphus’ sister sent her Psalm 126:6: “Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow will return with the songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them.” She pinned it to her wall alongside her career goals and calls the years since a “beautiful harvest.”
Piphus has carried that calling into her music. Her Cinderella Sweep album paired her with nearly 60 girls recruited through the mentoring nonprofit Saving Our Daughters, recording in Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York and Chicago sessions that doubled as each girl’s first time in a professional studio.
“By teaching [children] something new, they are inspired to be anything,” Piphus said of the project, describing how girls who’d never sung in a choir before left the sessions dreaming about careers as CEOs, judges and bakers rather than just singers.
Representation, she said, is the point. She remembers the moment she first saw women ventriloquists perform gospel material on stage and knew immediately she wanted to do the same.
“It is so important for young girls to see themselves represented in the most diverse spaces and unique spaces,” she said.
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