Aurelia Cats

Cirque Artists & Quarantine Creations Category Judge

Aurelia was born on July 12, 1979 in France. At age eight, she enrolled in the children’s program of Annie Fratellini’s Circus School. There, she found her vocation. By age ten, she had already won the K d’Or (first prize) at the Festival Première Rampe in Monte Carlo, the youth circus version of the International Circus Festival of Monte Carlo.

Aurelia was trained in every discipline related to the circus—from acrobatics to horse vaulting—by a series of brilliant circus instructors, including Enzo LaribleDavis BoginoClaude VictoriaLucio NicolodiManolo Dos SantosEnzo Cardona, and The Caroli Troupe, Domenico Caroli. It was Pauline Palacy and Sacha Dubrovsky, however, who made her an aerialist.

In 1995 she participated in the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain in Paris, where she won the Gold Medal in the Cirque de l’Avenir category (for performers sixteen years old and under); she also won the Silver Medal at the Festival of Riva del Garda in Italy. The following year, she won Bronze at the Wuqiao circus Festival in China & another Gold Medal at the Festival Cirkus Prinsessan in Stokholm.

These early successes were just the beginning of a brilliant career that took her from circus to theater, from varieté to television. Aurelia has been featured around the world including at Cirkus Scott in Sweden; in Paris at the Cirque d’Hiver-Bouglione, the Casino de Paris, the Olympia Music-Hall, and the Lido (as an original cast member of the revue Bonheur, which opened in 2003); in Germany at TigerPalast, Wintergarten, Apollo, and Palazzo; in Seattle and San Francisco at Teatro ZinZanni; and in special events for Cirque du Soleil. Additionally, she has appeared as main character in productions in Asia and Australia. She has also been featured in multiple European TV shows—including Mireille Dumas’s Aurelia Cats in France—and in 2008, she was a judge on the NBC TV series Celebrity Circus, in the United States.

Aurelia Cats resides between Switzerland , Singapore and France. She stopped performing in 2015 and is the co founder of a production company, Art Vision Production with the award-winning juggler, Viktor Kee . She has sit on the juries of the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain ,  the International Circus Festival of Monte Carlo , European youth Festival in Wiesbaden & the “Olac” Festival in Switzerland. 

In 2013 she was given an entry in the Dictionnaire universel des créatrices (Dictionary of creators) – (Paris, Editions des femmes) as the creator of a new trapeze style. (The book was a project supported by the UNESCO.)

Lately Aurelia Cats has been directing specialty acts and shows and her latest creation and Artistic direction is an exclusive trilogy consisting of 3 shows specially written and created for Costa Smealda cruises.