Who’s Who in New York: The Makers Behind the 53rd Village Halloween Parade

Darlings, every great New York night has a guest list and a crew list, and the crew is usually more interesting. On Saturday, the 53rd Village Halloween Parade sent its “Body & Soul” procession up Sixth Avenue from Canal Street to 15th Street. PIX11 put the marchers at more than 80,000 and the spectators at more than 2 million; ABC7 counted celestial snails and a small battalion of Dolly Partons. This installment of our Who’s Who in New York series is about the people who make the spectacle possible, the creatives you rarely see in the photographs.

Jeanne Fleming, the author of the night

Role: Artistic and Producing Director. PIX11 notes she has run the parade’s artistic direction for 46 years. Why she matters: she writes the theme, and this year’s note was a quiet manifesto against life lived through screens. “We need to get back into our bodies to express our souls!” she wrote, quoting Martha Graham’s line that “Dance is the hidden language of the soul.” Her note also invited marchers to honor the departed through costume, asking, “Dolly, will you be with us?” New York answered in rhinestones.

Her ask for next year: more room. “If you are listening, Mr. Mamdani, we need a longer parade,” she told PIX11 on Saturday night. “There are millions of people here for an event that New Yorkers really love, and we need more space.”

Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles, the official puppeteers

Role: Processional Arts Workshop, the Red Hook studio behind the parade’s luminous giants, whose 2026 concept was “Out of Body”: sleepwalkers and dreamers drifting above the avenue. Best line of the night: Kahn, on watching a puppet leave the studio: “It really is actually like having kids. I’m a dad,” he told PIX11. “You always think you can shape your child in a certain way and then they become their own person. It’s the same with the puppets.” Lineage: High Tea Magazine, drawing on the parade’s own history, notes that Fleming and two friends once made every puppet themselves, followed by Basil Twist, Debby Lee Cohen, Sara Peattie and the Puppeteers Cooperative, and then Processional Arts.

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Basil Twist, Julie Atlas Muz and Barbara Busackino, the Firehorse team

Role: the parade’s official site says this year’s procession was led by a new performance, Firehorse!, for the Year of the Horse: a puppet commissioned from master puppeteer Basil Twist, a MacArthur “Genius,” choreographed by the performance artist Julie Atlas Muz and produced by Barbara Busackino of Tandem Otter Productions. Why they matter: it is the rare collaboration where a puppeteer, a choreographer and a producer share billing, which is exactly how downtown theater has always worked.

Joey Arias, the grand marshal

Role: 2026 Grand Marshal. The parade calls him a “Legendary Performance Artist and Downtown Icon,” and its biography lists cabaret singer, jazz vocalist, songwriter, cult film star, theater artist, drag performer and fashion icon, concluding that he “defies categorization.” The parade notes he is currently appearing at HERE in Arias with a Twist. Downtown remains, gloriously, a small town with a very large wardrobe.

And the people who simply showed up

ABC7 found the real thesis on the sidewalk. One paradegoer, explaining the Dolly Partons, called her “one of the last people in the world people can agree was just a fantastic human being.” Ozaida Wilson built her look from a one-dollar bargain-store find and a wig she had lying around. A longtime marcher named Bob, who first attended in 1978, remembered a “totally different route” that wound around the Village. And per the stories trending on X, a 165-dancer Thriller troupe turned Sixth Avenue into a rehearsal-perfect music video. The parade began in 1973 with the mask maker Ralph Lee walking his children house to house, per High Tea Magazine; fifty-three years later, the price of admission is still a costume and nerve.

The Eileen Otte Ford footnote: “I create a look and I create a style,” the co-founder of Ford Models told People in 1983. The Village parade proves the corollary: a style can be manufactured by a whole neighborhood at once, provided someone like Fleming writes the brief.

Sources

1. NYC Village Halloween Parade: 2026 theme, Body & Soul (Jeanne Fleming; Processional Arts Workshop)
2. NYC Village Halloween Parade: home page (Firehorse!, Grand Marshal Joey Arias)
3. NYC Village Halloween Parade: 2026 press release No. 1 (PDF)
4. PIX11 via AOL: Halloween spectacle stuns again (Oct. 31, 2026)
5. ABC7 New York: Thousands of costumed revelers fill Greenwich Village for Halloween Parade (Oct. 31, 2026)
6. High Tea Magazine: Village Halloween Parade 2026 guide and history
7. Time Out New York: The 2026 Village Halloween Parade theme revealed
8. X: Village Halloween Parade Thriller dancers
9. The Globe and Mail (AP obituary): Agency founder Eileen Otte Ford set standard for modelling industry

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