Julia Christensen

Professor of Studio Art Julia Christensen was invited to present at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University on March 23 about her non-profit, The Space Song Foundation, and her global public art project/space mission, The Tree of Life. Christensen will also present the project at the Interplanetary Small Satellite Conference at CalTech in May, on the panel, "Incoming planned missions and innovative mission concepts."

The Cleveland Museum of Naturaly History has tapped Associate Professor of Integrated Media Julia Christensen to lead an event in its new Centennial Speaker Series, part of the museum's 100-year anniversary celebration. 

“The topics and themes that we’re addressing in the Centennial Speaker Series are fundamental,” notes Allison Grazia, the museum’s manager of public engagement. “It’s health, space, nature, human history, race—things that are part of our everyday lived experiences.”

In February 2022, Christensen will discuss her collaboration with scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop a technology that will send data about the natural world into space in the form of song, with the hope of eventually connecting with extraterrestrial life. The project, which sits at the intersection of science and art, is poised to take space exploration to another level.

Associate Professor of Integrated Media and Chair of Studio Art Julia Christensen will participate in “No Such Place as ‘Away’— Creative Ways to Deal with Waste: NPR's Frances Anderton in Conversation with Julia Christensen" at 1 p.m. EST Wednesday, January 27. Hosted by University College London / Bartlett School of Architecture, the event will stream on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/bartlettarchucl.

The average person throws away around four pounds of trash daily. Except that there is no such place as "away." Everything has to go somewhere. There is an end-of-life cost to everything. “Away” can mean storm drains, oceans, the stomachs of marine animals, a giant floating island of trash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the landfill. Designers are waking up to the need to change this picture and create products and buildings that can be recycled, repurposed, biodegrade—or not exist at all. 

Frances Anderton spoke to many of them for a recent radio series called Wasted. She met scientists genetically modifying plants to capture carbon from the atmosphere; formerly-incarcerated individuals trained to recycle computers; people fighting for their right to repair their own stuff, and an artist who is creating a conceptual space rocket flying light years away, to raise consciousness about e-waste. 

Frances Anderton and Julia Christensen will share stories from the frontiers of waste.

Associate Professor of Integrated Media Julia Christensen, a LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant recipient, will gave a multimedia presentation at on Wednesday, April 22 about her project and forthcoming book, Upgrade Available (Dancing Foxes Press, Spring 2020), which examines how “upgrade culture” fundamentally impacts our experience of time.

Associate Professor of Integrated Media Julia Christensen was interviewed in the Art Newspaper about her new book and solo exhibition, both titled Upgrade Available.

Associate Professor of Integrated Media Julia Christensen's project, Upgrade Available, with the LACMA Art + Technology Lab and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was featured in this video. Christensen's work to envision artwork for a long-term, interstellar space mission was also highlighted in the LACMA blog, Unframed.

Julia Christensen opened the gallery show Waiting for a Break at SPACES, a contemporary art venue in Cleveland, Ohio. The show was featured in the Plain Dealer, on WVIZ/PBS, and in a segment from Great Lakes Today.

Associate Professor of Integrated Media Julia Christensen has published two articles on Hyperallergic: “During the RNC, Two Art Projects Amplify the Voices of Ohio’s Citizens” and “Before Protesting at the Republican National Convention, Learn to Protect your Phone.” Both articles discuss artwork on view in Cleveland throughout the Republican National Convention.

Assistant Professor of Integrated Media Art Julia Christensen gave a public talk about her work Upgrade Available on February 5 at Harvestworks in New York City.

Assistant Professor of Integrated Media Art Julia Christensen presented on Upgrade Available, a body of work that explores our cultural relationships with obsolete electronic material, at the 2015 Creative Capital Retreat this summer. The presentation is now available to view online.

Assistant Professor of Integrated Media Art Julia Christensen has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship for Fall 2015. According to Christensen, MacDowell selects just 270 fellows out of the approximate 2,800 applications it receives every year.

As a MacDowell fellow, Christensen will complete a residency at MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the oldest and most revered artist colony in the nation. She will be working on her piece The Big Feed, which is part of her Creative Capital-supported work about our cultural relationships with discarded electronics.