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:

• Follow her on YouTube! Thea’s YouTube

• And instagram! Thea’s Instagram

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’, streaming on HBO Max.

Some more of my background!

I am an artist and experience designer working across sculpture, performance, immersive environments, and emerging technology.

I grew up moving between New Hampshire and Rome (Italy), following my father’s work as a Roman archaeologist. That early oscillation between landscapes, languages, and cultural systems shaped a core of my creative practice: I have always been attentive to converging realities, interstitial spaces, and the feedback loops between identity and its environment.

I began training in circus arts at 13 and was touring professionally in the circus as an aerialist by 16. Ever since I was a young girl, I have always wanted to fly.

After a few years of touring, I decided to enroll at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) - I wanted to design and build the worlds I performed in, not only activate them as a performer. At RISD I formalized my drawing and sculptural practice and learned to weld and fabricate.

Today, I work in many fields: film & TV; education; XR & emerging tech; experiential world building; and impact work. Whether I am designing multimodal environments, building kinetic sculptures, or developing new experiential systems around narrative, my work is rooted in a single belief: when you understand how the world around you is built, you gain the agency to rethink, and rebuild it.

Currently, I am focused on how physical, cultural, and psychological factors shape the interplay between an individual, a group, and the environment they inhabit. I am gathering generated data from interactions across a range of disciplines and exploring how that data can be visualized, materialized, and transformed into new forms of art and storytelling. My goal is to create work that makes the invisible visible - to widen our perceptual apparatus as humans. Information abundance demands pattern recognition, and in uncovering the metrics by which we form a sense of self and context, I seek to probing the nexus between individual identity and collective experience.

The above video describes my evolution in world building.