Ronald Binion-Biography

Recently Ronald Binion partnered with the Character Shop in Los Angeles to design, build and perform the "Doug" puppet character which was the spokesperson(puppet) for the 2012 Ford Focus.

Ronald Binion started his artistic life as a teenager while living on the north coast of California. While performing in community theater he and his brother also created their own small works of puppet theater. During High School Ronald took on the challenge of building and performing the large man-eating plant “Audrey 2” for a local production of Little Shop of Horrors.

Deciding to pursue the art of Puppetry he left Humboldt County in 1991 and trained at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, Georgia where he worked and trained for 3 years as a resident puppeteer and for a year as the head puppet builder.

While at the Center for Puppetry Arts Ronald performed in over 1,500 performances of shows using the entire spectrum of puppetry, from shadow puppets, to marionettes to the more familiar hand and rod Muppet-type puppet. He also performed on a national tour of the CPA’s production Dinosaurs.

In 1995 Ronald moved to New York and began working for the Muppets as a puppet builder.

At the Muppets Ronald worked on television shows and films including: Muppet Treasure Island, The Animal Show, Muppets Tonight, Elmo in Grouchland, The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss.

In 2000 Ronald was hired as a performer on the pioneering Disney Show The Book of Pooh which fused Muppet-type puppets with “table-top puppetry”. The show was shot entirely against green screen and the sets and backgrounds were rendered with real-time computer animation.

He has been nominated for an Emmy award for his work on the Disney Channel show The Book of Pooh, and the Nickelodeon show Wubbulous world of Dr. Seuss.

In 2002 he worked as the lead puppeteer on the Comedy Central show Crank Yankers which shot in Los Angeles, CA.

On Crank Yankers Ronald performed countless characters, but most notably the character Special Ed. Special Ed gained notoriety when he was beaten up by Eminem during the 2005 MTV Music Video Awards.

After Crank Yankers, Ronald worked in Reykjavik, Iceland as the Puppet Producer and head puppeteer on the Nick Jr. show LazyTown (Now seen on PBS Sprout).

Ronald has been a performance coach at the Eugene O’Neill Puppetry Conference in Waterford, Connecticut.

Ronald has produced many of his own works of theater puppetry at the O’Neill Theater Center, and was a Guest Artist of the conference in 2007 where he produced a show called Crossing Boundaries-Cradle to Grave. A show that dealt with the unsettling trend to target children for marketing messages.

Over the recent years Ronald has worked on pioneering children’s television shows in India, China, and the Australian show The Upside Down show which aired on Noggin.

Recently Ronald has been working with a Non-Government Organization called No Strings International. This NGO uses puppetry to deliver life saving messages to children in the developing world. He has been a lead puppeteer in No String's Tales of Disater and Kabing films shot in New York.

In addition to performing in the films Ronald also travels to countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, and Kenya, Uganda, and Haiti to train local aid workers in the use of puppetry in conjunction with presenting the No Strings films.

On the set of Crank Yankers puppeteering the character Special Ed