Biography
Dulcinea Circelli began her performance career as a tiny magician's assistant in her Magic Castle member hopeful father's magic shows. After a tragic chainsaw accident ended her father's magic career, Dulcinea spent her junior high and high school years playing piano, singing opera, training in gymnastics and Jazz dance, and performing in Southern California theatrical productions such as "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe," "Screwtape," "The Man of La Mancha," and "Faust." She was also the recipient of a summer theater intensive scholarship to the prestigious Idyllwild School for the Arts at age 15.
Although acting was her heart's calling, she followed a more practical path and went to community college at 16 years old, and graduated six years after at the University of Southern California as a premedical student with degrees in Creative Writing, Biology, and Neuroscience. She worked as a Biology, Math, and ESL teacher for community colleges and tutor companies for a few years after college, all the while still taking dance classes and sometimes moonlighting as a go-go dancer at various Hollywood clubs and speakeasies to supplement her adjunct professor income.
She became an accomplished cirque performer specializing in pole, Lyra, trapeze, and chair burlesque, eventually performing in a live music, burlesque, and cirque showcase at The Viper Room, and continues to work with LA's Mimoda Jazzo experimental dance and physical theater company. Her students (many of them much older adults) never knew.
While working as a teacher, one of Dulcinea's mentors at a school she worked for mentioned teaching is "an acting job," when she mentioned her unease in front of a large group of people. Dulcinea had a difficult time speaking and teaching in a classroom without a stage, costume, characterization or script. Dulcinea was feeling like a failure at something she actually hated: teaching science.
A few more acting classes, one dead body found in the community college gymnasium pool, and a school shooting threat later, Dulcinea was booking local commercial jobs and making a second income as an actress performing in online advertising, art films, and immersive theatrical cabaret/speakeasy events. With the addition of art modeling to her rotating roster of performances, Dulcinea was able to quit teaching to act, dance, and fly around with the circus full time. Dulcinea followed her dreams and decided to not wait around for another school shooting.
