Our Story
From a three-story cabaret in Bucharest to the open highways of America – how two artists traded everything they built for everything they believed in.
Bucharest – Where We Learned to Build Worlds (2009-2022)
2009. Bucharest.
Cristian was 22 years old, armed with a film degree and a reckless idea: What if theater wasn't about training actors, but about setting people free?
So he opened TeenMedia Academy in a basement rehearsal space with borrowed chairs and a vision that made no financial sense.
This wasn't acting school. It was permission.
Permission to rediscover the child within. Permission to need dialogue. Permission to belong.
Vania – artist, co-founder, the face and soul of everything we built – stood beside him as believer. The one who could see what didn't exist yet and insisted it should.
They were 22 and 21. Naive enough to think they could change things. Hungry enough to try.
Over 13 years, more than 1,000 people walked through those doors. Engineers who'd never been on stage. Single mothers looking for community. Corporate executives who'd forgotten how to play. Teenagers trying to find their voices.
Some stayed for one course. Some stayed for years, becoming part of a chosen family that met twice a week to laugh, cry, and remember what it felt like to be alive.
Then in 2011, we did something even more ridiculous.
We opened Teatrul În Culise – "Behind-the-Scenes Theatre" – in a three-story house near Piața Romană. A cabaret pub where the stage wasn't elevated, where actors performed inches from your face, where coming to theater felt like inviting your best friends into your living room to perform scenes from lives that could be yours.
Forbes Romania called it "a beacon of independent creativity," but that wasn't the point.
The point was the feeling.
Walking up those narrow stairs. The smell of coffee and old wood. The way the lights dimmed and suddenly you weren't a spectator anymore – you were inside the story.
We produced over 100 shows in that space. Comedies that made you laugh until your ribs hurt. Dramas that left the audience sitting in silence long after the lights came up. Thrillers where the line between stage and reality blurred.
First came "Imagineaza-ti ca esti Dumnezeu" (Imagine You Are God), a collage of short plays by the legendary Matei Vișniec. After seeing Cristian's production, Vișniec himself said it was "the best of dozens of productions he'd seen on stages around the world."
Not bad for a 26-year-old kid directing in a pub.
"Clinica Sinucigașilor" (The Suicide Clinic) – written by Gabriela Mihalache and directed by Cristian – became a phenomenon. A dark comedy about people in a clinic's waiting room, ready to end it all, only to discover why life is worth living. It ran for 10 years. It's still running. People brought their friends, their parents, their therapists.
Alongside the theater, Cristian was also running It'Showtime – a scrappy video production company creating commercials, branded content, music videos. Campaigns for BAT, Lidl, Carrefour. Anything to keep the lights on and fund the next production.
In 2020 – mid-pandemic, when most productions shut down – Cristian shot "Superstar", a 29-minute short film about a Romanian village where a young woman dreams of being on stage. The film screened in 40 countries.
But here's what nobody wrote about:
The nights Cristian slept on the theater couch because there was no money for rent anywhere else.
The months Vania worked other jobs to keep us afloat while we poured every cent into the next show.
The way Romanian independent theaters receive zero government funding – you live or die by ticket sales, and ticket sales alone.
The pandemic years – 2020, 2021 – when we fought to keep the theater alive even as the world locked down. Cristian said publicly: "Pandemia nu ne-a impus starea de hibernare" (The pandemic didn't impose hibernation on us). We kept creating. We kept producing.
But by 2022, we were exhausted.
Burnt out from the constant fight. Tired of scrambling. Hungry for something that didn't feel like survival.
And we asked ourselves: What if we started over?
Winter 2021.
The pandemic was grinding everyone down. Theaters were dark. Students were locked in their homes. The city we loved felt like a ghost of itself.
And we started asking the question we'd been afraid to voice:
What if we left?
Not ran away. Not gave up.
But chose something else.
We applied for EB-1 visas – the "extraordinary ability" classification that sounds impressive but feels like begging strangers to validate your life's work.
April 2022.
The email came.
Approved.
We stared at the screen. Read it twice. Three times.
This is real. We're actually doing this.
The Great Leap – Leaving Everything Behind (2022)
Then came the hardest part: letting go.
We sold TeenMedia Academy to a former student. Someone who'd started shy and uncertain, and left ready to lead. Passing the torch felt right – painful, but right.
Then we sold Teatrul În Culise.
Not to investors. Not to a corporation.
We found people who understood what the theater meant. People who would protect the soul of the place, not just profit from the address.
The day we signed the papers, Cristian walked through the empty space one last time. Three floors of memories. A decade of laughter and tears and standing ovations. The scuff marks on the stage floor. The coffee rings on the bar.
He turned off the lights.
Locked the door.
And we left.
October 2022.
We closed our Bucharest apartment. Said goodbye to friends who felt like family. Boarded a plane with two suitcases and a dream that terrified us.
We came to America on EB-1 visas – Cristian's application approved for "extraordinary ability in the arts." A bureaucratic stamp that said we were "worthy."
But we had no jobs waiting. No apartment. No safety net.
Just courage. And each other.
Landing in America felt like waking up in someone else's dream.
Everything was bigger, louder, faster. The language sounded familiar from movies but felt foreign in practice. We missed the narrow streets of Bucharest. The way everyone smoked on theater balconies between acts. The late-night wine and endless conversations about theater.
But beneath the disorientation, there was something else:
Space.
Space to imagine. Space to rebuild. Space to create something we couldn't have built anywhere else.
At Sea – Two Years in Motion (2023-2025)
We didn't come to America and immediately start building.
First, we went to sea.
In 2023, we joined Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings.
Cristian became an Entertainment Production Manager – overseeing the entire theatrical operation on massive ships. Managing casts of 20+ performers. Coordinating tech crews. Handling multimillion-dollar production assets. Running shows for 1,000-seat theaters on water.
Vania worked in cosmetology supervision – the artistry of appearance, the precision of beauty, the invisible labor that makes everything look effortless.
For two years, we lived at sea.
Our home was a cabin the size of a closet. Our office was the world. We sailed through the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Baltic. We docked in cities for eight hours and left before we could learn their names.
We were surrounded by people – thousands of people – every single day.
And we were profoundly, heartbreakingly alone.
Cruise ships are strange spaces. Everyone's in motion, but nobody's going anywhere. Everyone's performing – guests performing vacation, crew performing hospitality, entertainers performing joy.
We'd stand on deck at 3 AM, watching the black ocean, and think: Is this it? Is this what we left Bucharest for?
But in that stillness – somewhere between Gibraltar and Naples, or Nassau and Key West – something started to crystallize.
A vision.
What if we took everything we'd learned – all 13 years of it – and built it again?
Not just a theater. Not just a school.
But one space where all five of our passions could coexist:
Coffee – because every great conversation starts there
Art – because Vania's work deserves walls that honor it
Photography – because everyone deserves to be seen as they truly are
Acting – because transformation is a birthright, not a luxury
Performance – because theater is where we remember what it means to be human
What if those five things didn't compete for space, but fed each other?
What if the person who came for coffee stayed for the gallery?
What if the acting student became the subject of a portrait?
What if the audience at the show was also the community at the bar?
What if we built a place that felt less like a business and more like a home?
By the time our contract ended in September 2025, we knew exactly what we had to do.
Sacramento – Building the Dream
(September 2025 - Now)
September 7, 2025.
We walked off the ship in Miami for the last time.
Picked up a rental car. Started driving west.
Ten days on American highways. Florida to Texas to New Mexico to Arizona to California. Motels with thin walls. Diners with bottomless coffee. Long stretches of desert where the only sound was the hum of tires on asphalt.
We didn't talk much. We were tired. But somewhere around the Arizona border, it hit us:
We're actually doing this.
We're leaving behind steady paychecks and employee housing.
We're gambling everything on an idea.
We're going to a city where we don't know a single person.
And it felt right.
We chose Sacramento for reasons we couldn't fully explain at first.
It wasn't LA's chaos or San Francisco's price tags. It was something softer. Something possible.
We drove through Midtown on a Saturday night during Second Saturday Art Walk and saw it:
The murals. The galleries. The people spilling out of dive bars and coffee shops. The DIY energy. The way creativity felt accessible here, not gatekept by money or connections.
It reminded us of early Bucharest – before the rents skyrocketed, before the tourists took over. A city in transformation. A city where artists could still afford to take risks.
We walked R Street. Explored the warehouses-turned-studios. Sat in independent coffee shops and eavesdropped on conversations about art shows and open mics and "this thing I'm working on."
And we realized:
Sacramento has everything except what we're building.
No space brings coffee, gallery, theater, photography, and education under one roof.
No space creates a full ecosystem where each experience strengthens the others.
No space feels like a sanctuary for the unhidden – the immigrants, the introverts, the artists who don't fit the mold.
So we're building it.
Not in five years. Not "eventually."
Now.
We're teaching our first acting workshops.
We're shooting our first portrait sessions.
We're meeting with landlords and architects.
We're writing grant applications at 2 AM.
We're building LOCUL one brick, one person, one conversation at a time.
What LOCUL Means – And Why It Matters
LOCUL means "the place" in Romanian.
But meanings are slippery things. Words carry more than definitions.
To us, LOCUL means:
The place we searched for in Bucharest and never quite found.
The place we dreamed about at 3 AM on the ship deck.
The place where you don't have to perform, you can just be.
LOCUL is five experiences that live, breathe, and grow together:
SIP @ LOCUL
Specialty coffee, but make it ritual. The scent of espresso. The pause before the first sip. The conversations that start with "What are you working on?" and end three hours later with new friendships.
DESIRE Gallery
Sensual, provocative, unapologetically bold art curated by Vania. Bodies as they are, beautiful, flawed, human. Art that makes you feel something, even if it makes you uncomfortable.
Unhidden Studio
Fine-art photography for people who've never seen themselves as art. Boudoir. Nudes. Portraits that capture not what you look like, but who you are when you stop performing.
The Form Academy
Acting classes for non-professionals, built on Cristian's Seen Method the same philosophy that transformed 1,000+ students in Romania. Not "how to act." How to be seen. How to take up space. How to speak your truth.
The Stage
100 intimate seats. No curtain between you and the performer. No barrier between art and audience. Theater as communion, not consumption.
Each pillar feeds the others.
The person who comes for coffee discovers the gallery.
The acting student books a portrait session.
The photographer's client returns for a show.
The audience becomes the community becomes the family.
We're launching right now, running workshops, shooting portraits, building momentum, while working toward opening the full brick-and-mortar space in 2026.
If you've ever felt too much.
If your art was called "too intense," your voice "too loud," your presence "too overwhelming."
If you've been told to tone it down, fit in, stop making it weird.
If you've ever walked into a room and thought:
"God, I wish there was a place where I didn't have to shrink."
This is that place.
If you're an immigrant rebuilding your life in a new country.
If you're an introvert who craves connection but hates small talk.
If you're an artist who refuses to be invisible.
If you've started over new city, new chapter, new self and you're looking for people who get it.
You just found your people.
LOCUL isn't for everyone.
And thank god for that.
We're building this for the seekers. The truth-tellers. The ones who left everything behind because staying would have killed something inside them.
For anyone who's ever whispered to themselves:
"There has to be something more than this."
There is.
And you're standing in it.
