- July 14, 2025
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Ocoee’s Katrina Mena Rick always wanted to be a mermaid.
Growing up, she loved watching Ariel from Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” sing and dance as a misunderstood mermaid-turned-human and felt she was a kindred spirit as they both felt they didn’t fit in the worlds in which they lived.
So when she graduated from Full Sail University with a masters, she dreamed of becoming a performer.
Little did she know, her dream would come true in the most magical place on earth as a senior creative producer at Disney Live Entertainment with her most recent project being The Little Mermaid — A Musical Adventure, which debuted May 27 at Hollywood Studios.
Her hard work, dedication and passion over 14 years of working with Disney led to Mena Rick being the first person inducted to the Full Sail University Hall of Fame in the field of theme park entertainment.
Growing up as a first-generation Cuban in Hialeah, Florida, Mena Rick didn’t always feel like she fit in.
She grew up in a Spanish-speaking household and she listened to Disney sing-along tapes and watched Disney movies on VHS to learn the language and connect to American culture.
“I lived in Hialeah, Florida, which has the largest Cuban population outside of Havana, so it’s like a microcosm of Cuban culture,” Mena Rick said. “Disney was that connection to that connection to American culture and also gave me the permission to dream and inspired me to be an artist and inspired me to sing.”
With her vocal background, Mena Rick secured her first job at Disney as a casting director for The American Idol Experience.
“I didn’t know what a seasonal job at Disney was, so I gave up a full-time job teaching music to take this opportunity, and I would sleep with the phone next to me every single morning, just waiting for somebody to call in sick so I could take their shift,” she said. “I volunteered to work weekends, nights, holidays. I didn’t care. I put my entire soul into it.”
Her dedication to the job helped her discover her superpower at Disney. She was the only cast member at the attraction to speak Spanish and Portuguese. She noticed many guests auditioning for The American Idol Experience in Spanish, but there weren’t songs for them in Spanish.
In her free time, she produced a deck of songs she thought would be excellent additions to the soundtrack.
Since then, Mena Rick superpower and drive to pursue the next steps in her career have launched her to where she is now as a senior creative producer.
“I took what made me different, what made me feel misunderstood, and I made it something that I was proud of and bold about,” she said. “I did that not only to find my voice but to hopefully inspire others to find theirs with authentic representation that I didn’t have growing up. I wanted to create and blaze that trail for my daughters and future generations.”
When Disney was creating “¡Celebración Encanto!” at Epcot, Mena Rick saw an opportunity to include more cultural representation with a fully bilingual script.
“I remember first reading the script, and it was in English, and I was like esperate, esperate, esperate (wait, wait, wait), this needs Spanish,” she said. “The fact we were able to put Spanish on the screen (in the show), that is literally a love letter to little Katrina. It’s a love letter to all the little Katrinas out in the world that don’t have a place that hopefully they can feel like they do when they come here."
Mena Rick said her 14-year career at Disney has been humbling. She’s learned to not only expand on her musical talents but also incorporate technology and work with different teams such as 3D modelers, animators, digital artists and puppeteers.
“There was nothing that was going to prepare me for this other than the passion and the willingness to learn and the willingness to collaborate, be creative, think outside the box and just be a really good team player,” she said. “It means the world to me to have this honor because there’s so many people that dream this dream so I’m just lucky that I’m actually living this dream. I’m sharing this dream with so many other talented cast members.”
Mena Rick said there are times she feels she has imposter syndrome as she’s working with hundreds of talented individuals on projects like The Little Mermaid — A Musical Adventure.
With The Little Mermaid attraction, she said there was an immense “responsibility of shepherding a show that is so iconic and has such an important role” in Disney’s brand. The team creating the attraction didn’t want to take away from the scenes and moments from the movie people know so well and made “The Little Mermaid” special.
“We wanted to keep them and elevate them,” she said. “It took a lot of really talented, brilliant, creative people, a melding of minds and multi-disciplinary collaborations like never before.”
She said she served as the bridge between the practical and digital for the show.
Mena Rick’s talents allowed her to find her ways to elevate the show, such as during the “Under the Sea” performance when she worked with digital artists, animators and puppeteers to ensure every character played its musical role correctly.
She came full circle in life watching the final production of The Little Mermaid — A Musical Adventure for the first time. She recalled sitting in front of the TV screen as a girl watching the animated version of Ariel finding where she belonged in the world.
To make the first viewing even more special, Jodi Benson, the voice of the legendary mermaid, attended the performance.
“I was sitting next to our video designer and my lead VFX designer doing something boring and technical, and then all of a sudden I heard screaming,” Mena Rick said. “I literally stood up and my jaw dropped. I was like, ‘Oh my god, my childhood idol just walked into the theater.’ I froze. I cried. I felt all the feels. … It was one of the best moments of my life.”
All of her accomplishments with Disney have led to her induction into the Full Sail University Hall of Fame.
“I had major imposter syndrome being on stage with Grammy and Oscar winners when I’m working in a theme park, but they embraced me with open arms, and they were just as excited about the work that we do as I was with the work they did,” she said. “It’s truly a validation of the hard work, the investment I made in myself, the 21-year-old Katrina that moved here with $200 in her pocket, and it finally paid off.”
