Overview
Nina Conti is a British actress, comedian and ventriloquist, and the most interesting argument in the modern art form. Her main figure, Monkey, spends much of the act attacking it — pointing out that he has no microphone, that all his ideas are hers, and calling ventriloquism "a dead art." The deconstruction is the act.
She came to it sideways. Born in Hampstead to the actors Tom Conti and Kara Wilson, she took a first-class degree in philosophy from the University of East Anglia in 1995 and worked as an actress from 1996, including a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2000/01.
Ken Campbell
The turn came from the experimental theater director Ken Campbell, who mentored her and then devised a ventriloquist play, Let Me Out!!!, which she took to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2001.
The debt runs deeper than a first break. When Campbell died, Conti inherited his puppets — including the elderly woman who became Granny, debuted at the Melbourne Comedy Festival in 2010. She made a documentary about the rest of them, Her Master's Voice (2012), in which she took Campbell's bereaved figures to a puppet graveyard in Kentucky. It earned a BAFTA nomination, a Grierson Award, and joint Best Performance at the Maverick Movie Awards.
The mask act
Conti's second innovation is turning the audience into the figure. She fits a volunteer with a mask she controls, and works them as a dummy. She used it on Russell Howard's Good News in 2012, expanded it to two audience members at once on the series 8 premiere of Live at the Apollo, and built a routine around the resident prop man on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown in 2015.
Film and television
Conti and Monkey played a morning weather team in Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration (2006), and she returned for Guest's HBO mockumentary Family Tree (2013) as Bea Chadwick. Her debut feature as writer, director and star, Sunlight, completed filming in 2023. She appears as Moira in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025).
Figures
- Monkey
- Granny
Timeline
- 1995 — First-class honors degree in philosophy, University of East Anglia
- 2000–01 — Member of the Royal Shakespeare Company
- 2001 — Takes Ken Campbell's Let Me Out!!! to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
- 2002 — Wins the BBC New Comedy Awards
- 2007 — First solo full-length show, Complete and Utter Conti, at Edinburgh
- 2008 — Wins the Barry Award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (tied with Kristen Schaal)
- 2010 — Debuts Granny at the Melbourne Comedy Festival
- 2012 — Her Master's Voice — BAFTA nomination and Grierson Award
- 2024 — Sunlight, her debut feature as writer, director and star
Watch
On video
44 performances cataloged in our archive. needs research: curate + embed the best 5–8; the rest 301 here
Sources
- Nina Conti — Wikipedia. Accessed 2026-08-13.
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