Julie Weitz
Working across performance, film, installation, and photography, Julie Weitz accounts for the wounds and resilience of diasporic culture by creating embodied and collective experiences for repair. Weitz probes the potential for embodied performance art to activate concepts of diaspora and doikayt. Doikayt, meaning “hereness,” is a Yiddish organizing principle—popular in prewar Eastern Europe, it has re-emerged in the 21st century as a cultural and political framework for radical Jewish diasporism. Weitz’s performance art practice animates figures from Yiddish folklore and uses the interactions between figures and sites—especially those where Yiddish culture was all but eradicated—to explore themes of loss and healing through a diasporic lens. She engages with caricature, folklorism, and emplacement to historicize her work in relation to past, present, and future developments in Jewish culture.
Weitz is a Fulbright Scholar (2023–24) and Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellow at Yiddishkayt (2020–23). Her artwork has been exhibited at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco), Galicia Jewish Museum (Krakow), Jewish Museum of Vienna (Austria), LAND (Los Angeles), Lambert Center for the Arts (NYC), and Judisches Museum (Germany). She has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, BOMB, and Hyperallergic. Weitz received her BFA from the University of Texas and MFA from the University of Wisconsin.