Julia Christensen

Biography

Julia Christensen is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work explores systems of time, change, landscape, and technology. Her research-based art practice spans installation, sound, video, photography, animation, and writing. 

Christensen was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (Fine Arts,2018), the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Fellowship (2017), the Creative Capital Fellowship (Emerging Fields, 2013), Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award (2013), and an individual fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts (2007). She has been awarded artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Fulcrum Arts, Wexner Center for the Arts Film/Video Studio, and the Experimental Television Center. Her work has exhibited internationally, at venues including Eyebeam (NYC, NY), Ronald Feldman Fine Arts (NYC, NY), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LA, CA), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (Cleveland, OH), Carnegie Museum of Fine Arts (Pittsburgh, PA), Empire Shirine Gallery (New Delhi, India), and the Pori Art Museum (Pori, Finland). 

Christensen is the author of Big Box Reuse (MIT Press, 2008), a book about her decade-long research/art project documenting civic reuses of Walmart and Kmart buildings across the United States. Big Box Reuse won the Association of American University Presses’ Book of the Year awards in trade non-fiction and design, among other awards. A solo exhibition of Christensen’s artwork opened alongside the book launch at Carnegie Mellon University’s Miller Gallery. Big Box Reuse was featured in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, USA Today, All Things Considered, Washington Post, and many other publications. Christensen’s second book, Upgrade Available (Dancing Foxes, 2020), documented her long-term investigation into contemporary upgrade culture. The book launched alongside a solo exhibition with the same title at ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles. Upgrade Available includes documentation of Christensen’s art projects related to the investigation, intertwined with her essays and interviews with scholars and thinkers related to the research. The book reached wide acclaim, with reviews in Los Angeles Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, and the Art Newspaper. 

Christensen’s writing has additionally appeared in numerous publications including Cabinet, Orion, Architect Magazine, Print, Slate, and Hyperallergic. Her work has been included in several books, including Younger Than Jesus Artist Directory (Phaidon/New Museum), It’s the Political Economy, Stupid (edited by Gregory Sholette and Oliver Ressler, Pluto Press), and Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes (DAP/Walker Art Center).

Christensen is the President of the Space Song Foundation, a non-profit organization she founded with visionary scientists and engineers to cultivate long-term thinking at the intersection of art, science, and design for applications in outer space. The primary project of the Space Song Foundation is the Tree of Life, a public art project that creates a 200-year “duet” between terrestrial trees and a spacecraft in Low Earth Orbit, singing to each other over radio waves about environmental conditions on Earth and in space. Christensen is a board member of the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Culver City, CA.

Christensen is the Eva and John Young-Hunter Professor of Art at Oberlin College, where she is also the founder and director of the dual degree BA+BFA in Integrated Arts. She previously taught at Stanford University, California College of the Arts, and Pratt Institute. She has been invited to speak about her projects at Yale University, CalTech, Carnegie Mellon, the National Arts Club, IdeaFestival, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Dreamworks Studios, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. She is an alum of Bard College, Mills College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Interlochen Arts Academy.