Julie Weitz

Julie Weitz (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, film, installation, and photography. She probes the potential for embodiment and performance art to activate concepts of diaspora and doikayt, or “hereness”, a Yiddish concept that flourished in prewar Eastern Europe. Doikayt has re-emerged in the 21st century as a cultural and political framework for Jewish kinship and solidarity with movements for liberation. 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, CA), Galicia Jewish Museum (Krakow, Poland), Jewish Museum of Vienna (Austria), L.A.N.D. (Los Angeles, CA), Lambert Center for the Arts (NYC, NY), Jewish Museum of Maryland (Baltimore, MD) and Judisches Museum (Augsburg, Germany). She has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, The 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.