Julia Steinmetz

Julia Steinmetz is a performance studies scholar, contemporary art writer, visual artist and performer.
Julia holds a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (2017) and an MFA in Photography and Media from the California Institute of the Arts (2002). She is a Deep Listening Certificate holder (2016), having studied under composer Pauline Oliveros. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary art, psychoanalysis, Black studies, feminist theory, queer of color critique, and transgender studies. Her research is organized around a central question: how are we transformed by aesthetic experience? Her book manuscript, Performance Between the Psyche and the Social, focuses on mechanisms of psychic, interpersonal and social transformation in contemporary performance, institutional critique, and collective forms.

Julia’s scholarly work has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Studies in Gender and Sexuality. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, QED: A Journal of GLBT Worldmaking, E-misférica, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, in which she also co-edited the special issue Feminist Landscapes. Her writing also appears in the edited volume Queer (MIT Press 2016) and Commerce by Artists (Art Metropole, 2011) as well as the exhibition catalogues Cassils (MU Endhoven) and Cassils: Solutions (Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston TX).

She is co-founder of the Los Angeles performance collective Toxic Titties, with whom she has performed and exhibited at LACE, REDCAT, USC Center for Feminist Research, the Hammer Museum, CoCA Seattle, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Art in General, Art Basel Miami Beach, Whitechapel, MUCA Roma (Mexico City), Ex-Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), Schnitt Austellungsraum (Cologne), and MUMOK (Vienna). Her collaborative film and video work has appeared in international film festivals including Outfest: Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Viennale International Film Festival, Centro de la Imagen (Mexico City), and on the DVD compilation First Person. Her work has been reviewed in Tema Celeste, the LA Times, LA Weekly, Rhizome, Wired, Black Book, MASKA, and she has been interviewed for National Public Radio, the Utne Reader, and the Journal of the National Women’s Studies Association, as well as numerous academic publications.

PhD, MA, Performance Studies
New York University (2017)

MFA, Photography and Media
California Institute of the Arts (2002)

BA, Studio Art
Carleton College