Chase Woolner is a puppet builder and performer from Chicago, Illinois who served as an additional puppeteer on the films The Muppets and Muppets Most Wanted, as well as an intern with Puppet Heap which worked on designing and building the characters.
Woolner's interest in puppetry began at a young age and he started performing publicly for his elementary school classes. While his parents traveled back and forth between Chicago and San Francisco for work, Woolner joined the San Francisco Bay Area Puppet Guild, becoming one of the youngest members at that time.
Having trained with many of the top puppeteers and builders in the USA, Woolner decided to further his education and was accepted as a bachelor of fine arts puppetry student at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, California in 2008. Since then he has been a participant several times at the Eugene O'Neill National Puppetry Conference and has worked professionally as a junior hire with Puppet Heap, an intern with the Jim Henson Creature Shop, and a concept designer with Walt Disney Imagineering.
Woolner finished work on his own, original story puppet short, entitled s'Muther, screened at film and puppetry festivals in 2011.