About

Thea Ulrich is an award-winning director, experience designer, and artist working in TV, VR, web3, AI, and immersive events.

Thea is also a STEAM educator online, on TV, and at events:

Thea ran away and joined the circus at the age of 13, touring as a aerialist for a number of years before attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

Notable awards include winning the TriBeCa Film Festival’s 2018 Storyscapes Award, and groundbreaking work in XR & VR led to a Lumiere Award in 2019.

Thea Ulrich is a co-host on the TV show ‘Mark Rober’s Revengineers’, currently airing on the Discovery Channel - coming soon to HBO Max and Discovery plus!

A little video clip about my mission ♥️

Some more of my background!

I grew up moving back and forth between New Hampshire and Italy - my father is a Roman Archaeologist, so his work would take us over to Italy. I first learned Italian when we moved to Rome when I was 6 years old, and my parents put me in an elementary school in the middle of Rome. I didn’t speak a word of Italian on my first day at school, but a year later - and more than a few embarrassing ‘language learning moments’ - I spoke fluently.

I started circus officially at the age of 13, and fell in love. Ever since being a young girl, I had always dreamed about being able to fly. In our remote town in New Hampshire, there were no circus programmes or classes nearby, but I wasn’t the type of person to take no for an answer, even then. I went to a local fabric store and purchased a long bolt of fabric that felt…kind of like the right material?? (spoiler: it wasn’t the right material, but that is actually how I started learning aerial silks!). I then drilled a hole in the 8’ ceiling of my bedroom, threaded in an i-bolt, and hung up the fabric. I would research tricks on google images, and then teach them to myself every day after school. Finally, after a few months of this my parents realized, reluctantly, that this wasn’t a phase that was going to disappear. They agreed to circus classes with two Russian coaches who lived an hour and forty minutes away.

I trained obsessively hard, and often would go a live with my Russian circus coaches (who had toured with the Moscow circus for many years) for periods of time. I started touring semi professionally at the age of 14 for 2 years. By 16, I started working and touring professionally, which lasted another two years.

I loved circus, but I also had many ideas of my own that I wanted to create. Aerial sculptures I could perform on, wild and intricate installations to create shows with. I wanted to not only be a performing body in someone else’s show - I wanted to learn how to make my own show. At 17 I started college at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), a rigorous fine arts programme. I have always been able to draw photo realistically, and ever since I was young I drew and painted large scale artworks, as well as sculpted and made wood carvings. At RISD, I learned to formalize these skills, and that was where I first learned to weld, so I could create my own aerial sculptures to perform in.