Julie Phelps works at the intersection of art, aesthetics and social architecture

I intentionally translate myself across multiple public roles because I value hybridity as an offset for dogmatics and polemics, maintaining mutable specialization in my creative work. I consistently engage the economy (as structure, system, notion) and queer (as tactic, aesthetic, question) as a lens for perception, communication, and action. I began first working onstage, in theater and speech when I was 14. Dance became the cornerstone of my practice in 2008 when I began studying with Sara Shelton Mann in San Francisco and then fell in with a loose community of people making performances in and around Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory. My stage work is often framed within improvised dance, state-based work, and improvised spoken word/storytelling. I simply find working onstage with the participation of an intimate audience a deeply divine experience. I’ve been part of hundreds of devised/collaborative contemporary live art projects, either as performer or producer. Notably, I am the artistic & executive director of CounterPulse, a transdisciplinary art space seated on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land now known as San Francisco. I also co-instigated what became the collectively improvised failure dance Turbulence (a dance about the economy) with Keith Hennessy which toured the US and Europe 2012 to 2017. Currently, I am collaborating with Marc Kate on an improvised work at the intersection of experimental music and experimental dance and Ruairí Ó’Donnabháin on DICK, a project looking at the methodology of metaphor. I was hosting regular all night music/dance events with T.V.O.D before the pandemic, we’re just getting started again now. counterpulse.org

To co-create body-based communities is integral to my creative practice and personal activism.

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