Henson was born in Greenville, Mississippi, the younger of two boys. His parents were Betty Marcella (née Brown) and Paul Ransom Henson, an agronomist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He was raised as a Christian Scientist and spent his early childhood in Leland, Mississippi, before moving with his family to Hyattsville, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., in the late 1940s. He later remembered the arrival of the family’s first television as “the biggest event of his adolescence,” having been heavily influenced by radio ventriloquistEdgar Bergen and the early television puppets of Burr Tillstrom (on Kukla, Fran, and Ollie) and Bil and Cora Baird.

He remained a Christian Scientist at least into his twenties when he would teach Sunday School but fifteen years before he died he wrote to a Christian Science church to inform them he was no longer a practising member.

In 1954 while attending Northwestern High School, he began working for WTOP-TV, creating puppets for a Saturday morning children’s show called The Junior Morning Show. After graduating from high school, Henson enrolled at the University of Maryland, College Park, as a studio arts major, thinking he might become a commercial artist. A puppetry class offered in the applied arts department introduced him to the craft and textiles courses in the College of Home Economics, and he graduated in 1960 with a BS in home economics. As a freshman, he had been asked to create Sam and Friends, a 5-minute puppet show for WRC-TV. The characters on Sam and Friends were forerunners of Muppets, and the show included a prototype of Henson’s most famous character: Kermit the Frog. Henson would remain at WRC for seven years from 1954 to 1961. “Among the first of his assignments at WRC was Afternoon, a magazine show aimed at housewives. This marked his first collaboration with Jane Nebel—the woman who later became his wife”

In the show, he began experimenting with techniques that would change the way puppetry had been used on television, including using the frame defined by the camera shot to allow the puppeteer to work from off-camera. Believing that television puppets needed to have “life and sensitivity,” Henson began making characters from flexible, fabric-covered foam rubber, allowing them to express a wider array of emotions at a time when many puppets were made of carved wood. A marionette’s arms are manipulated by strings, but Henson used rods to move his Muppets’ arms, allowing greater control of expression. Additionally, Henson wanted the Muppet characters to “speak” more creatively than was possible for previous puppets—which had seemed to have random mouth movements—so he used precise mouth movements to match the dialogue.

When Henson began work on Sam and Friends, he asked fellow University of Maryland sophomore Jane Nebel to assist him. The show was a financial success, but after graduating from college, Henson began to have doubts about going into a career as a puppeteer. He wandered off to Europe for several months, where he was inspired by European puppeteers who look on their work as an art form. Upon Henson’s return to the United States, he and Jane began dating. They were married in 1959 and had five children, Lisa (b. 1960), Cheryl (b. 1961), Brian (b. 1963), John (1965–2014), and Heather (b. 1970).

Despite the success of Sam and Friends (which ran for 6 years), Henson spent much of the next two decades working in commercials, talk shows, and children’s projects before being able to realize his dream of the Muppets as “entertainment for everybody”. The popularity of his work on Sam and Friends in the late fifties led to a series of guest appearances on network talk and variety shows. Henson himself appeared as a guest on many shows, including The Ed Sullivan Show (although on his appearance on the Sep 11, 1966 episode of the show—released to DVD on 2011 as part of a collection of episodes featuring the Rolling Stones—Sullivan mis-introduces Henson as “Jim Newsom and his Puppets”). This greatly increased exposure led to hundreds of commercial appearances by Henson characters throughout the sixties.

Among the most popular of Henson’s commercials was a series for the local Wilkins Coffee company in Washington, D.C., in which his Muppets were able to get away with a greater level of slapstick violence than might have been acceptable with human actors and would later find its way into many acts on The Muppet Show. In the first Wilkins ad, a Muppet named Wilkins is poised behind a cannon seen in profile. Another Muppet named Wontkins (with Rowlf’s voice) is in front of its barrel. Wilkins asks, “What do you think of Wilkins Coffee?” and Wontkins responds gruffly, “Never tasted it!” Wilkins fires the cannon and blows Wontkins away, then turns the cannon directly toward the viewer and ends the ad with, “Now, what do you think of Wilkins?” Henson later explained, “Till then, [advertising] agencies believed that the hard sell was the only way to get their message over on television. We took a very different approach. We tried to sell things by making people laugh.” The first seven-second commercial for Wilkins was an immediate hit and was syndicated and re-shot by Henson for local coffee companies across the United States; he ultimately produced more than 300 coffee ads. The same setup was used to pitch Kraml Milk in the Chicago area and Red Diamond coffee.

In 1963, Henson and his wife moved to New York City, where the newly formed Muppets, Inc., would reside for some time. Jane quit performing to raise their children. Henson hired writer Jerry Juhl in 1961 and puppeteer Frank Ozin 1963 to replace her. Henson later credited both writers with developing much of the humor and character of his Muppets. Henson and Oz developed a close friendship and a performing partnership that lasted 27 years; their teamwork is particularly evident in their portrayals of the characters of Bert and Ernie and Kermit and Miss Piggy.

Henson’s 60’s talk show appearances culminated when he devised Rowlf, a piano-playing anthropomorphic dog. Rowlf became the first Muppet to make regular appearances on a network show, The Jimmy Dean Show. Henson was so grateful for this break that he offered Jimmy Dean a 40% interest in his production company, but Dean declined stating that Henson deserved all the rewards for his own work, a decision of conscience Dean never regretted. From 1963 to 1966, Henson began exploring film-making and produced a series of experimental films. His nine-minute experimental film, Time Piece, was nominated for an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film in 1966. The year 1969 saw the production of The Cube—another Henson-produced experimental movie.

Also around this time, the first drafts of a live-action experimental movie script were written with Jerry Juhl, which would eventually become Henson’s last unproduced full-length screenplay, Tale of Sand. The script remained in the Henson Company archives until the screenplay was adapted in the 2012 graphic novel, Jim Henson’s Tale of Sand.

In 1969, Joan Ganz Cooney and the team at the Children’s Television Workshop asked Henson to work on Sesame Street, a visionary children’s program for public television. Part of the show was set aside for a series of funny, colorful puppet characters living on the titular street. These included Grover, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Cookie Monster and Big Bird. Henson performed the characters of Ernie, game-show host Guy Smiley, and Kermit, who appeared as a roving television news reporter. It was around this time that a frill was added around Kermit’s neck to make him more froglike. The collar was functional as well: it covered the joint where the Muppet’s neck and body met.

At first, Henson’s Muppets appeared separately from the realistic segments on the Street, but after a poor test-screening in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the show was revamped to integrate the two, placing much greater emphasis on Henson’s work. Though Henson would often downplay his role in Sesame Street’s success, Cooney frequently praised Jim’s work and, in 1990, the Public Broadcasting Service called him “the spark that ignited our fledgling broadcast service.” The success of Sesame Street also allowed Henson to stop producing commercials. He later remembered that “it was a pleasure to get out of that world”.

In addition to creating and performing Muppet characters, Henson was involved in producing various shows and animation insets during the first two seasons. During the first, Henson produced a series of counting films for the numbers 1 through 10, which always ended with a baker (voiced by Henson) falling down the stairs while carrying the featured number of desserts. For seasons two to seven, Henson worked on a variety of inserts for the numbers 2 through 12, in a number of different styles—including film (“Dollhouse”, “Number Three Ball Film”), stop-motion (“King of Eight”, “Queen of Six”), cut-out animation (“Eleven Cheer”), computer animation (“Nobody Counts To 10”). Jim Henson also directed the original C Is For Cookie.

Concurrently with the first years of Sesame Street, Henson directed Tales from Muppetland, a short series of TV movie specials—in the form of comedic tellings of classic fairy tales—aimed at a young audience and hosted by Kermit the Frog. The series included Hey, Cinderella!, The Frog Prince, and The Muppet Musicians of Bremen.

Concerned that the company was becoming typecast as a purveyor of solely children’s entertainment, Henson, Frank Oz, and his team targeted an adult audience with a series of sketches on the first season of the groundbreaking comedy series Saturday Night Live (SNL). Eleven “Dregs and Vestiges” sketches, set mostly in the Land of Gorch, aired between October 1975 and January 1976, with four additional appearances in March, April, May, and September. Henson recalled that “I saw what [creator Lorne Michaels] was going for and I really liked it and wanted to be a part of it, but somehow what we were trying to do and what his writers could write for it never gelled.” The SNL writers never got comfortable writing for the characters, and frequently disparaged Henson’s creations; one, Michael O’Donoghue, memorably quipped, “I won’t write for felt.”

Around the time of Henson’s characters’ final appearances on SNL, he began developing two projects featuring the Muppets: a Broadway show and a weekly television series. In 1976 the series was initially rejected by the American networks who believed that Muppets would appeal to only a child audience. Henson was finally able to convince British impresario Lew Grade to finance the show, which would be shot in the United Kingdom and syndicated worldwide. That same year, he scrapped plans for his Broadway show and moved his creative team to England, where The Muppet Show began taping. The Muppet Show featured Kermit as host, and a variety of other memorable characters, notably Miss Piggy, Gonzo the Great, and Fozzie Bear. Kermit’s role on The Muppet Show was often compared by his co-workers to Henson’s role in Muppet Productions: a shy, gentle boss with “A whim of steel” who “[ran] things as firmly as it is possible to run an explosion in a mattress factory.” Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, remembered that Henson “would never say he didn’t like something. He would just go ‘Hmm.’ That was famous. And if he liked it, he would say, ‘Lovely!’ ”  Henson himself recognized Kermit as an alter-ego, though he thought that Kermit was bolder than he; he once said of the character, “He can say things I hold back.”

Jim Henson was the performer for several well known characters, including Kermit the Frog, Rowlf the Dog, Dr. Teeth, the Swedish Chef, Waldorf, and Link Hogthrob.  In 1977, Henson produced a one-hour television adaptation of the Russell Hoban story Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas.

During production of his later projects, Henson began to experience flu-like symptoms. On May 4, 1990, Henson made his last appearance with Kermit on The Arsenio Hall Show, one of his last television appearances. At the time, he mentioned to his publicist that he was tired and had a sore throat, but felt that it would go away.

On May 12, 1990, Henson traveled to Ahoskie, North Carolina, with his daughter Cheryl to visit his father and stepmother. The next day on May 13, Henson, feeling tired and ill, consulted a physician in North Carolina, who could find no evidence of pneumonia by physical examination and prescribed no treatment except aspirin. Henson returned to New York on an earlier flight and canceled a Muppet recording session scheduled for May 14.

Henson’s wife Jane, from whom he was separated, came to visit and sat with him talking throughout the evening. On the evening of May 15, at 2 am, Henson was having trouble breathing and began coughing up blood. He suggested to his wife that he might be dying, but did not want to bother going to the hospital. She later told People magazine that it was likely due to his desire not to be a bother to people. Although it is rumored that his Christian Science faith prevented him from visiting the hospital, his stepmother and others deny this, as he had ceased practicing 15 years earlier. His wife Jane thinks that his Christian Science upbringing, while not directly responsible, “affects his general thinking.”

Two hours later, Henson finally agreed to go to New York Hospital in New York City. By the time he was admitted shortly at 4 am, he could not breathe on his own anymore and he had abscesses in his lungs. He was placed on a mechanical ventilator to help him breathe, but his condition deteriorated rapidly despite aggressive treatment with multiple antibiotics. After Henson’s death in the early morning of May 16, 1990 at the age of 53, the news of his death reached newspapers and television crews hours later.

The official cause of death was first reported as Streptococcus pneumoniae, a bacterial infection. Bacterial pneumonia is usually caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae, an alpha-hemolytic species of Streptococcus. It was later classified as organ failure resulting from streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (caused by Streptococcus pyogenes). S. pyogenes is the bacterial species that causes strep throat, scarlet fever and rheumatic fever. It can also cause other infections.

On May 21, Henson’s public memorial service was conducted in New York City at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Another one was conducted on July 2 at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. As per Henson’s wishes, no one in attendance wore black, and The Dirty Dozen Brass Band finished the service by performing “When the Saints Go Marching In”. Harry Belafonte sang “Turn the World Around,” a song he had debuted on The Muppet Show, as each member of the congregation waved, with a puppeteer’s rod, an individual, brightly colored foam butterfly. Later, Big Bird, performed by Caroll Spinney, walked out onto the stage and sang Kermit the Frog’s signature song, “Bein’ Green”.

In the final minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour service, six of the core Muppet performers—Dave Goelz, Frank Oz, Kevin Clash, Steve Whitmire, Jerry Nelson and Richard Hunt—sang, in their characters’ voices, a medley of Jim Henson’s favorite songs, eventually ending with a performance of “Just One Person” that began with Richard Hunt singing alone, as Scooter. Henson employee Chris Barry writes that during each verse, “each Muppeteer joined in with their own Muppets until the stage was filled with all the Muppet performers and their beloved characters.” The funeral was later described by Life as “an epic and almost unbearably moving event.” The image of a growing number of performers singing “Just One Person” was recreated for the 1990 television special The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson and inspired screenwriter Richard Curtis, who attended the London service, to write the growing-orchestra wedding scene of his 2003 film Love Actually.

Henson was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery and Mausoleum in Ardsley, New York, and two years later, his ashes were scattered in a desert near Taos, New Mexico.