Short Film Director & Line Producer
During the 2020 lockdowns, a new creative opportunity opened up for Julia – she was asked to direct two original short films, Chicken and Ray and Doreen, for a local Arts Council-supported project called Connect. For a huge cinema lover, it was amazing for Julia to begin working as a director in this medium.
Since then, Julia has continued collaborating with emerging writers, bringing the way she works as a theatre director into the film production process and creating the one-take short film A Clean Slate and the Cornwall-shot story of a woman living with endometriosis, To Womb It May Concern – currently receiving awards on the festival circuit.
Recently, Julia has developed her skillset and worked as a Line Producer with SendCake Films on the new horror short Anastasis.
Cinema is a matter of what‘s in the frame and what’s out.
Martin Scorsese
Writer
In 2005, Julia started to write, having been inspired and encouraged by the award-winning playwright and screenwriter Helen Edmundson. Having been fascinated by Edith Wharton’s groundbreaking short novel Summer for many years, Julia began the process of adapting it into a play. But rather than adapt the whole novel in a conventional sense, she decided to focus on the relationship between the three main characters and create a play that told the story wholly from their point of view. After several years of workshopping and development, the first production of the play premiered on the London fringe in 2012, with the script being published by Playdead Press to coincide with the production.
Julia chose to challenge herself even further with her second adaptation – Hamlet our brother. She reimagined William Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a solo piece from the perspective of the character of Horatio. The first production of the play premiered on the London Fringe in 2016.
In 2018, Julia worked with the London-based arts organisation Little Opera as a guest playwright, adapting the work of their young students into a new opera, The Wolf Queen.
Julia is currently in the development of her third play, an adaptation of a novelette by the renowned diarist and writer Anais Nin.
Adaptations are new plays too.
Helen Edmundson
Photographer
Over the last few years, Julia has become increasingly interested in photography. Firstly, taking images on her iPhone – capturing moments with landscapes, architecture, and still life. And then having the opportunity to take pictures with a digital camera, a Nikon D700 and more recently on analogue with a Leica M6.
Being inspired by the images created by such iconic photographers as Don McCullin, Vivian Maier, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Miller, Dorothea Lange, Robert Capa, and Garry Winogrand has encouraged Julia to explore photography and what she wants to say with the pictures that she takes.
In 2019, Julia was part of the Conway Photography Group, run by the renowned portrait photographer Grace Gelder at Conway Hall in Holborn, London. Over a period of 9 months, the monthly workshops were a mixture of tutorials, theory, and practical exercises, covering topics such as portrait photography, public vs private, photography ethics and photography and psychology. The course then culminated in a month-long exhibition at the space in November 2019.
Following the success of the Conway Photography Group, Julia and a number of the photographers from the 2019 course decided to continue to meet each month, nominating a different host for each session to set photographic tasks for the group inspired by a current London exhibition. They would then discuss and critique each other’s photos as a group at the end of each workshop. The group is currently (and affectionately) called the ‘ExCons’ Photography Group, and it provides Julia with a continued source of inspiration to explore her photography process in their meetings.
Photography isn‘t about seeing, it’s about feeling.
Don McCullin
Analogue images for the ‘ExCons’ Photography Group
Digital images for the ‘ExCons’ Photography Group
Digital images for Conway Hall Photography Group
iPhone images