Who is juggler Wes Peden?

Wes Peden is an energetic trend-setting juggler, constantly looking for new ways to thrill an audience.

His complex and playful juggling style has seen him become hugely popular with audiences and fellow jugglers alike, but it’s also been brought to life in a number of solo shows, including ZEBRA, Béton, and his latest one-hour performance Rollercoaster.

In February 2025 Peden brought Rollercoaster to the Southbank Centre as part of our Imagine Festival, an excuse for us to take a closer look at the man described as ‘a world-class juggling superpower’. 

He’s been voted the world’s most popular juggler

And not just once. Not twice, even. But no fewer than ten times in all. Peden has been recognised as such through the annual ‘Top 40 jugglers’ poll, run on YouTube by the juggler and performer Luke Burrage. Having first received the accolade as a teenager in 2007, Peden has appeared in the top five every year since. 

Juggling runs in the family

Peden was born in 1990 in Rochester in the state of New York and began juggling at the age of five. His teacher was his father Jeff, himself a professional juggler, and the two would begin performing together when the younger Peden was eleven-years-old. According to an interview Wes Peden gave for website The Widow Stanton, his father ‘still performs quite a bit. Before we were juggling together he was already doing about 100 shows a year. When I started getting more and more into juggling we created a duet show, and were performing that for a few years, with many shows around the east coast of the States’.

He’s been making videos of his juggling since the age of 11

If you’re in Gen Z then that probably won’t sound that impressive – who in 2025 isn’t uploading videos, daily, to multiple platforms. But back at the turn of the millennium, for the young Peden, this involved two VCRs and a hefty VHS tape editing system. But as internet video sites took off in the 2000s, Peden was perfectly placed to embrace the new opportunities this presented, capitalising on the growth of YouTube and other platforms to create and release bigger and brighter juggling videos.

He ran away to the circus

Actually, that’s a bit of a dramatic spin on reality. But in 2007 Peden did leave the US for Sweden to attend the Dance and Circus University of Stockholm. It was during his three years here that Peden first encountered the man he considers his mentor,  the acclaimed juggler Jay Gilligan, who he studied under for three years. ‘He taught me basically everything I know,’ Peden explained in an interview with the website StageLync, ‘he still gives me great advice on every project I do. He’s a genius!’

His style owes a lot to Sean McKinney

Whilst Gilligan may have been Peden’s guiding light, the juggler who had the greatest influence on his style was the now sadly departed, Sean McKinney. ‘I saw him when I was nine years old at this competition where everyone was performing with, like, jazz music, or in a vest [waistcoat],’ Peden explained to Around About Circus’ Elena Stanciu. ‘…then this guy comes skateboarding on to the stage in jeans and a T-shirt and does incredible new beautiful kind of punk juggling. I was like, “What is this guy?” and he inspired me that juggling didn’t have to be done in just one way. It didn’t have to have a certain aesthetic, that it was broader than I’d ever imagined. So when I saw him at that young age I was like, ‘OK, juggling isn’t this, juggling is whatever you want it to be’.

He’ll juggle pretty much anywhere

Peden has built up an impressive number of passport stamps through his juggling, taking his shows across the globe to more than 25 countries including Australia, Iceland and Japan. But whilst he may not have quite appeared everywhere, he can, and has, taken his act anywhere, performing in Olympic stadiums in Tokyo, Broadway theatres in New York and glacier museums in Iceland. So whilst he’s no stranger to the stage – and has performed on ours before too, as part of 2020’s London International Mime Festival – he’s equally adept at taking his act out and about, juggling across parking lots and pavements.

He’s won a huge number of accolades and honours

Too many for us to list in fact, but they include awards from the International Juggling Association and the festival Cirque de Demain. He also holds a number of juggling world records, including the record for juggling with seven clubs – performing 20 catches in a 2016 routine – and the record for juggling nine ring tiplexes – achieving 42 catches in his 2017 video, Gumball.

He lives and breathes juggling

Surely, you may be thinking, there must be more to this man than keeping things in the air. Well, apparently not. Not according to the man himself and this answer he gave when asked by The Widow Stanton if he had any hobbies. ‘I know this sounds boring but juggling is both my work and my hobby. I could say filming and editing or buying weird clothes but I only film and edit to make juggling videos and I only buy weird clothes because it makes my juggling look better. Everything I do fits into my juggling.’

But he does so in order to set new standards

‘The main thing that defines me, the reason I juggle, is to create new tricks, new forms of juggling and to try to make something that someone has never seen before within the juggling world,’ he told Around About Circus in 2024. ‘I want people to come out of my show thinking: “I’ve never seen anything like that. I didn’t know juggling could be like that. Those were some tricks I didn’t imagine would ever be possible.’