Julie Weitz
is an artist, writer, and educator who creates embodied, collective experiences for repair by unearthing the wounds and resilience of diasporic culture. Working across performance, film, installation, and photography, Weitz explores the potential of embodied performance art to activate concepts of diasporism and doikayt. Doikayt, meaning “hereness,” is a Yiddish organizing principle—prominent in prewar Eastern Europe and re-emerging in the 21st century as a cultural and political framework for radical Jewish diasporism that stands in solidarity with global liberation movements. Weitz’s research-based art practice animates figures from Yiddish folklore and uses their interactions with culturally resonant 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 situate her work within the past, present, and future of Jewish cultural developments.
Weitz is a Fulbright Scholar (2023–24) and a Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellow at Yiddishkayt (2020–23). Her work has been exhibited at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco), POLIN Museum (Warsaw), Galicia Jewish Museum (Krakow), Jewish Museum of Vienna, Coaxial Arts Foundation (Los Angeles), Lambert Center for the Arts (NYC), and the Jüdisches Museum (Augsburg). She has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, BOMB, and Hyperallergic. Weitz is a contributing writer for Momus and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and is on the faculty of the University of Nevada’s MFA Interdisciplinary Arts program.