Laura Lippert is an aerialist, actor, dancer, acrobat, performance artist, and teacher. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has described her work as “a spectacle so mesmerizing, it leaves the audience in awe.”  Laura has performed in over seven countries, with companies and shows including Broadway Variété, Gynoïdes, Circus Monti, Nadère Arts Vivants, and El Circo Cheapo Cabaret.  Venues include Montreal’s top theaters, la TOHU, Usine C, and La Chapelle, St. Louis’ treasured local City Museum, Copenhagen’s audacious Republique, the renowned Orionteatern in Stockholm and the International Finance Center in Shanghai.  Laura has taught aerial arts everywhere from Aloft Circus Arts in Chicago to Dans och Cirkushögskolan in Stockholm, and she has appeared at corporate events and commercials for high-powered companies such as Pantene and Aveda.

Laura found circus as a young woman, after climbing trees incessantly and doing competitive gymnastics as a child then majoring in dance and theater at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School as a teenager.  After realizing that her intended bachelor’s degree in interior architecture involved far too much sitting still, Laura jetted off to France to work as a nanny.  In 2007, she began training circus under Shayna Swanson at Aloft Circus Arts in Chicago.  Three years later, she went on to learn the art of hair hanging.  Armed with French fluency and a trade-school certification in welding, Laura next travelled to Sweden and Quebec to construct and devise an act with the aerial chair, an apparatus of her own invention whose development was partially funded by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.  In Stockholm, she collaborated with Christian “Vippen” Vilpolla—also a key architect of her unique hair hang number—and in Montreal she worked with coaches Rachel Walker, Victor Fomine, and Yury Boyzan.