معرفی
Julie Weitz (she/her) is a Los Angeles-based visual artist, writer, and educator currently serving as Visiting Faculty at the University of Nevada, Reno's MFA Interdisciplinary Arts program. She is also currently based in Berlin where she continues her artistic practice. Her work explores the intersection of performance art, Jewish culture, and diasporic identity through embodied experiences that create collective healing.
Weitz received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Her educational background informs her interdisciplinary approach that bridges visual art, performance, and cultural theory.
Her research focuses on Performance Art, Video Art, and Interdisciplinary Art with particular emphasis on Jewish culture, Yiddish folklore, and the concept of doikayt (hereness). She creates embodied, collective experiences for repair by unearthing the wounds and resilience of diasporic culture. Working across performance, film, installation, and photography, Weitz explores the potential of embodied performance art to activate concepts of diasporism and doikayt. Doikayt, meaning 'hereness,' is a Yiddish organizing principle—prominent in prewar Eastern Europe and re-emerging in the 21st century as a cultural and political framework for radical Jewish diasporism that stands in solidarity with global liberation movements.
Her artistic output reveals a consistent evolution from early digital explorations like the 'Touch Museum' exhibition to her current work in Eastern Europe, where she creates site-specific performances based on Yiddish folklore. Projects like 'My Golem as The Great Dominatrix' reinterpret traditional Jewish myths through a lens of political critique, while 'Seven Beggars' creates participatory rituals that engage with Jewish spiritual traditions in public spaces. Her recent work increasingly focuses on healing from intergenerational trauma through embodied practices at historically significant sites.
- Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellow at Yiddishkayt (2020-23)
- 2020-21 Cultural Trailblazer of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs
- Fulbright Scholar (2023-24)
Weitz is a contributing writer for Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles and Momus. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco), POLIN Museum (Warsaw), Galicia Jewish Museum (Krakow), Jewish Museum of Vienna, and Jüdisches Museum (Augsburg). She has been featured in major publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, BOMB, and Hyperallergic. Her practice involves collaborating with memory workers in ancestral Yiddish homelands to transform cultural memories of genocide and displacement into reparative tools for healing in the present.
