About

(doro)thea ulrich is an award-winning artist, creative director, and experiential designer whose work explores the boundary between perception and reality - how we experience the world, how we remember it, and how those forces quietly but profoundly sculpt our behavior, bodies, and environments. 

Working across art, technology, performance, and spatial design, she develops projects that make invisible or transient forces - constraint, motion, desire, fear, and accumulated experience - legible through physical and experiential form. Her practice is rooted in the belief that individual agency and ethical collective systems begin with increasing perceptual awareness: the capacity to notice what is present but often unseen.

Thea bridges embodied practice with systems thinking. She toured professionally as a circus aerialist and contortionist before studying design, psychology, and emerging technologies at RISD and Brown University, ultimately learning to engineer and weld the kinetic installations she performed on. This uncommon synthesis of physical challenge, technical rigor, and reflective inquiry continues to inform her approach to complex social and cultural questions. 

Her newest work translates biometric data, motion capture, and spatial mapping into painted, sculptural, and immersive environments that invite viewers to examine how internal states and external conditions influence decision-making and behavior. She is currently expanding this research into work that engages directly with the design of ethical shared futures, examining how awareness of lived experience and expanded perceptual limits can inform the systems we build together.

Her projects have garnered widespread recognition, including a Tribeca Storyscapes Award (2018) and a Lumière Award (2019) for the mixed-reality experience HERO. She has contributed to works ranging from Disney’s Avatar ride to multi-story installations at MASS MoCA, and has developed creative work for organizations including Sundance, RISD, Burning Man, Legendary Entertainment, Warner Music Group, Discovery, Scholastic, and more. Thea’s creative practice extends into education, mentorship, and service-oriented initiatives that expand access to creative technologies and embodied learning, including recent community-rebuilding work developed in partnership with displaced populations in Uganda.

At the core of Thea’s work is an inquiry into responsibility and agency: how people navigate systems they did not design, and how awareness can catalyze change. If boundaries are often misperceptions informed by the limits of our sensing and mapping tools, Thea’s goal is to create art and environments that recalibrate perception across the senses - cultivating greater responsiveness to oneself, to others, and to reimagining the structures that govern our shared lives.

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.