We Are Puppeteers logo
Headline: About

Books, Puppets, Fun,
and Literacy too

We Are Puppeteers is a small company located in Arizona that offers award winning children’s books, workshops, and custom made puppets to stimulate the creative puppeteer in all of us.

We Are Puppeteers works with students and teachers in the classroom to create puppet shows or interactive book readings.

Television Screen with cacti in the forground and an open book.
The students are the puppeteers. We rehearse with the students and then they perform for their parents or classmates. We Are Puppeteers provides original puppet shows and puppets for the students to use for the performance.

The students participate by narrating the story, manipulating the puppets, creating sound effects for the show, and using their imagination. Students collaborate with each other to create a live performance.

We Are Puppeteers works on location in schools, libraries, book stores, churches, theaters, gardens, parks, museums, and homes.
“The We are Puppeteers artist in residence proved to be an amazing experience for our students. We spent one week, creating, then learning a performance to present on Friday.

This particular experience combined art, theatre and language arts and students were able to thrive depending on their strengths while learning new skills.”

Karen Danesi
Librarian SCIS
Shanghai, China
Author Vicki Riske has been interested in puppetry and storytelling for many years. She created puppets for theatre productions at NDSU in Fargo. After graduation, Vicki produced a television show for Channel 4 in Fargo, “Owlwitness News with Olivia de Hoot and the Owlwitness News team.”

Over the years Vicki worked in several theaters painting scenery, making props, crafts, and costumes. She worked in theaters in Fargo; Detroit; Ann Arbor; Boston and Tempe.

Vicki was also involved in the commercial and film industry in Arizona working on numerous commercials, television productions and films; most famous being “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”

In the 90s she made a shift to Computer Graphics and worked for several years as an animator for Green Rabbit Design Studios. Following that she produced online instructional products for text books at Pearson.

In 2014, Vicki traveled to China as an Artist in Residence for two international schools in Shanghai. She enabled K-5 grade students to create puppets and puppet shows.

She writes and illustrates award winning children’s books. Her fourth book, Fishy Tales has been translated into Spanish by Sonia Elizabeth Urrutia de Soto, Los pececitos aventureros. These two books are about fish who love to swim, and play in the ocean. But encounter environmental problems in their ocean caused by plastic trash. This book is a great conversation starter for discussions on climate change and our responsibility to care for our planet earth.

The New Polka Dot Tea Party, is about friendship and discovery. It contains colorful illustrations of the Sonoran Desert and its inhabitants. Our owl is now on every page which is super fun as you read the story.

Phoenix artist Laura Best illustrated Grandma Bibi, a heartwarming story about shared memories and love. It tackles the difficulties of memory loss in older loved ones from a child’s perspective. Sonia Elizabeth Urrutia de Soto, translated the text for the Spanish version, La Abuela Bibi.

Vicki’s third book, My Teeth Are Too Big, is about challenges that come with change and how the magic of dreams can help us cope.