Oct 20, 2026 · 37 min · 13 segments
Maren Wade sits down with two-time world champion acrobatic gymnast Shenea Booth, professionally known as Shenea Stiletto. She spent more than a decade with Cirque du Soleil, founded the Circus Arts…
So the pandemic, I think, is something that brought every single industry and brought Vegas to its knees.
If you survived the crash of 08 and then you saw what was happening in 2020, like I did and like so many of us have, I don't think that you could come away from that experience not saying that we needed to do more, we needed to do better by way of our local industry and all of our friends and all of our community.
And so that was born out of frustration, out of the fact that I felt that local representatives, state, federal, everybody just really dropped the ball for our industry.
And For those of us that all work so hard, that are like the backbone of Nevada and the economy and the creative economy, I thought that along with so many of us, how unfair.
And we need to get in there and we need to fight for our rights and our industry.
So it's been a six-year journey in creating the Circus Arts Guild of America and giving us a name, a collective name, an industry name.
What stories I've had, I think the majority of the stories that we all have had of being quite like kind of nameless,
being in an environment that everyone says is so glamorous and so amazing, but we know how hard it is behind the scenes to sustain these careers of being a working artist.
When anyone wants to cut a budget, within any type of company or corporation, they cut us first.
We are the first on the list to go and we're the last to get the support that we need.
And we started building and drafting our own policies to answer to those issues and those problems when we saw that no one else really
So the pandemic, I think, is something that brought every single industry and brought Vegas to its knees.
If you survived the crash of 08 and then you saw what was happening in 2020, like I did and like so many of us have, I don't think that you could come away from that experience not saying that we needed to do more, we needed to do better by way of our local industry and all of our friends and all of our community.
And so that was born out of frustration, out of the fact that I felt that local representatives, state, federal, everybody just really dropped the ball for our industry.
And For those of us that all work so hard, that are like the backbone of Nevada and the economy and the creative economy, I thought that along with so many of us, how unfair.
And we need to get in there and we need to fight for our rights and our industry.
So it's been a six-year journey in creating the Circus Arts Guild of America and giving us a name, a collective name, an industry name.
What stories I've had, I think the majority of the stories that we all have had of being quite like kind of nameless,
being in an environment that everyone says is so glamorous and so amazing, but we know how hard it is behind the scenes to sustain these careers of being a working artist.
When anyone wants to cut a budget, within any type of company or corporation, they cut us first.
We are the first on the list to go and we're the last to get the support that we need.
And we started building and drafting our own policies to answer to those issues and those problems when we saw that no one else really
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