About

Tulia Henderson is an actor and filmmaker based in Rome and New York.

She came to acting from behind the camera. At the American University of Rome she writes, directs and edits her own short films — among them The Other Woman, a dark comedy staged in a neon-lit pool hall that flips a gender trope and an eight-ball table at the same time. It was the work of directing other actors that pulled her in front of the lens: running a beat for the twentieth take, waiting for the moment a performance stops being a performance. That was the job she wanted.

She has been working on camera since 2022, when she played Madeline Von Cleave in Cherry on Top, Bella Bandol’s high-school comedy shot in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. In 2025 she took one of three principal roles in Take It, Don’t Take It, a short written and directed by Yesui Narankhuu and shot in raw black-and-white — a morally ambiguous encounter between strangers, built almost entirely out of glances and silence.

Directing taught her what a scene actually asks for: specificity, real listening, and the willingness to be surprised by the other person. It is also what draws her toward Meisner-based conservatory training, a technique built out of exactly those things.

She works in English and Italian, fluently in both, and graduates from the American University of Rome in December 2026.

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Working in Rome

Four years of building work in an international programme in Rome has meant crews and casts drawn from a dozen countries, sets run in more than one language, and the habit of finding the shared instinct in a room where nobody starts from the same assumptions. It is good training for a set, and better training for a scene.