Angela Nikolau

Angela Nikolau was born in Moscow on 24 June 1993, to a family passionate about circus art. She lived with her parents in a circus community house until she was 2 years old and then moved to live with her grandmother.

For the first six years of school, she attended public schools, later transferring to a Christian School of Arts. Nikolau did rhythmic gymnastics from the age of seven until she was 16. She has worked as an art teacher for children since she was 16. She also worked as a bell ringer in a church during her final school year.

After graduating, Nikolau entered the Russian State Specialized Academy of Arts. She studied there for five years but left during her senior year to pursue her passion in rooftopping and photography.[1]

Nikolau took her first rooftop images in Moscow. After that she was actively travelling around the world and publishing photos taken at height.[2][3][4][5][6]

In 2015, Nikolau was engaged as a witness in an investigation against a rooftopper Vladimir Podrezov and his friends who painted the star of the Stalinist skyscraper on Kotelnicheskaya Embankment into Ukrainian flag colours.

In 2016, Nikolau went to China for the first time to scale the highest construction site in the world. Together with Ivan Beerkus, they climbed Goldin Finance 117 in Tianjin and the construction crane at the top of the tower. As of April 2020, the video shot by the two, was viewed more than 920,000 times. The video attracted the attention of the global media.[7][8][9]

In 2017, Nikolau played the main character in the Danish documentary On the Edge of Freedom.

In 2018, she played one of the lead roles in a Who is Next? documentary by Slovak documentarian Miro Remo.

In 2022, Nikolau and Beerkus scaled the rooftop of the Malaysian skyscraper Merdeka 118 - the second-tallest building in the world. This event was covered by multiple media around the world. Instagram videos of the accomplishment reached 8.6 million views.[10][11][12][13][14][15][16]

Nikolau gained 730,000 followers on Instagram during her career.[17][18][19][20] She worked as a model for Cartier, Kenzo, Adidas, Calvin, Klein, Samsung, Pandora, Jo Malone, and Formula I.

Nikolau creates extreme Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) around the world and holds exhibitions of her NFT creations and paintings. In August 2022, Nikolau launched her first NFT collection called "Freedom in the Sky" consisting of 50 NFTs. She publishes her extreme photographs as NFTs. NFT collections became quite popular and were purchased by big NFT art collectors, as well as shown at prominent NFT exhibitions such as Art Basel Miami 2022 and NFT NYC 2023. Her works were also published in the NFT Yearbook - a book compiling the best artists of the NFT space in 2022.[21]

Father – Dmitriy Nikolau, circus performer, clown and animal trainer. Mother – Olga Nikolau, circus performer. Siblings: Diana, Tikhon, Matryona, Maria, Matvey.