Aurelia Cats

Aurelia Cats was born in Ares, France. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father, a mechanic. At age eight, however, Aurelia enrolled in the children's program of Annie Fratellini's Ecole Nationale du Cirque in Paris. There, she found her true vocation. By age ten, she had already won the K d'Or (first prize) at the Festival Premiere 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 Larible, Davis Bogino, Claude Victoria, Lucio Nicolodi, Manolo Dos Santos, Enzo Cardona, and Domenico Caroli. It was Pauline Palacy and Sacha Dubrovsky, however, who made her into an aerialist. Aurelia made her professional debut in 1993,when she was fourteen years old. In 2003 her trapeze act was featured at the "Lido de Paris", the legendary Parisian cabaret. 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 the Gold Medal at the Festival Cirkus Prinsessan in Stokholm. These early successes were just the beginning of a brilliant career, one that took her from circus to theater, from varieté to television. Aurelia has been featured at Cirkus Scott in Sweden; in Paris at the Cirque d'Hiver-Bouglione, the Casino de Paris, the Olympia Music-Hall, and the Lido; in Germany at TigerPalast, Wintergarten, Apollo, and Palazzo; in Seattle and San Francisco at Teatro ZinZanni; and in special events for Cirque du Soleil. She has also appeared in several 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 in Switzerland. Although she continues to perform, she also manages a production and talent company: Art Vision LLC with Viktor Kee and Oleg Izossimov. In addition, she has sat on the juries of the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain (2005) and the International Circus Festival of Monte Carlo (2008).