Mariel Romero Méndez is a Costa Rican contemporary circus artist, aerialist, and emerging director currently based in North Carolina, USA.

With a background in Dramatic Arts from the University of Costa Rica, she completed the Professional Track Program at the New England Center for Circus Arts (NECCA) and earned her degree in Contemporary Circus Arts at Cirko Vertigo in Italy.

Her artistic practice combines aerial dance, physical theater, humor, and political satire to explore social structures, migration, labor, and the absurdities of contemporary life. With over a decade of experience in circus arts, she has worked on social circus projects across Central and South America, collaborating with communities and using movement as a tool for dialogue and transformation..

Now developing her voice as a director, Mariel is interested in creating interdisciplinary performances that challenge the boundaries of contemporary circus, provoke critical thinking, and embrace the absurd as a form of artistic resistance.

My passion for creative movement breathes when I can interact with people in  their communities bringing them the shows that I have the privilege to bring to life. To me, that's the same happiness that you experience harvesting tomatoes from the garden - knowing you can share with the ones you love the bounty of your work. Most of the dance and circus I practice is social and political. When I listen to what the people learned by watching my work and where they reacted to my material, it gives me guidance.  performance is my medium to make this world a better place little by little, through a well placed laugh and a frowned eyebrow.

I want to have the impact of doubt, of critical thinking, I want to make those who don’t use their privileges of living in a better world feel uncomfortable and I want to make those who have not eaten today laugh. My art aims to generate a space in which unique experiences occur, and motivate exchange of ideas, mutual growth and permanent challenges. dancing in a wheelbarrow, doing butoh in corcovado national park (the jungle in costa rica), climbing and feeling the uncontrollable impulse to let go of the aerial apparatus, win a bungee competition with a performance, do silks on the bow of a cargo ship under construction and over the water in the bahamas , sail with pirates who are also circus artists but don't know it yet, climb a ficus tree full of clay, bury my head in sand  so people think about where the hell they have theirs, normalize the absurd as the absurd already is. These are just the beginning of an endless number of stories that my dance/art has visited.

Movement therefore becomes the irreverence that saves me from the meaningless absurdity of bureaucracy. Dance is one of the many ferments that start and sustain life, movement becomes a matter of life or death.