About Ulka
A native of Montréal, Canada, the multi-cultural and multi-lingual Ulka Simone Mohanty has a passion for all things performance (and culinary!), and is drawn to storytelling in all forms. She spends her time either acting on screen, behind the mic in a recording studio, on stage in regional theatre productions, choreographing for and/or performing in dance shows, or occasionally being a chef and food stylist for TV, film or fabulous dinner parties.
As an actor, she is known for her film and TV work on FOX‘s The Moodys, Doggoned by award-winning director Arshad Khan, and a supporting role in John Ridley‘s sci-fi movie, Needle in a Timestack. Always thrilled to return to the stage, some of her most memorable productions have been Madhuri Shekhar’s House of Joy at San Diego Rep, Women Beyond Borders at Rubicon Theatre Company, Amir Abdullah’s Ovation Award winning play Pray to Ball at Skylight Theatre and Gus Krieger’s mind-bending opus Sherlock Through The Looking-Glass at The Odyssey Theatre.
As an established multi-lingual voice actor with a singular talent for accent, dialect and voice-matching work, Ulka happily shares her time between animation for film and television, video games and audiobook narration. She is known for her voice work on Golden Globe and Oscar winner Pixar‘s Soul, Warner Bros.‘ Jellystone, Humanitas Prize winning NBC Universal‘s Nina’s World, and has been the official Disney park voice for several attractions at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. In the audiobook and narration world, with dozens of titles under her belt, her work on Megha Majumdar’s New York Times Bestseller A Burning earned her an Earphones award for outstanding ensemble narration and made the 2021 RUSA Listen List highlighting extraordinary narrators. She has voiced and performed motion-capture for numerous video games, including; Ubisoft‘s Watch Dogs: Legion, lead character Echo Swift in Sumo Games‘ Crackdown 3 and several characters in Asgard’s Wrath by Sanzaru Games, including drunken shield-maidens hurling insults in Old Norse.
A classically trained dancer in bharatanatyam and contemporary dance, Ulka started dancing when she was three years old and simply never stopped. A member of the South Asian Dance Alliance of Canada (SADAC) she was featured in The Dance Current magazine as one of Canada’s notable dance artist practitioners of South Asian dance forms. She choreographs, performs, teaches master classes and workshops and is one third of the children’s dance-theatre performing troupe Dancing Storytellers.
Her most notable choreography work has been for Disney‘s Rivers of Light, The Jungle Book: Alive With Magic, and Disney-Pixar collaboration Up! A Great Bird Adventure. After a successful summer run at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, her choreography on The Jungle Book: Alive With Magic went on to be presented at The White House for the 2016 Kids’ State Dinner hosted by Michelle Obama for her Let’s Move! initiative for aspiring children chefs. (Watch the show, here!)
She has appeared as a chef on The Food Network‘s Cutthroat Kitchen, was the culinary producer and food stylist for Danish Renzu’s film The Illegal, and co-produced, co-wrote and co-starred in TV series The Dinner Bash, part sit-com, part cooking show and part talk show about three chefs navigating the joys of cooking and the pitfalls of dating. She also keeps a haphazardly-maintained food blog at Little Ninja Chef.
Ulka holds a B.Sc. from McGill University in Computer Science and Linguistics, two yoga teacher certificates and has been known to tutor in math, french and physics, from time to time. She knows Kung Fu (advanced belt in Shaolin White Crane), a smattering of other martial arts, and was on her varsity fencing team. She is based both out of Los Angeles, California and Vancouver, B.C..