I move to feel the earth beneath my feet. I move to become. I am becoming... what... more human, more other, more... of myself, or maybe a better self. I want to listen and deeply listen. What does my body have to say? How does the world shape my body, and how can I revolt? My body is an archive, and I dance with ghosts. My dance is a bridge: a bridge to the past, present, and future. A bridge to home and unknown geographies. Through moving, I acknowledge the years of sweat, tears, blood, labor, rigor, bones, joy, and absurdity, that have helped shape this moment. With antenna out, I dance to see - to see and feel it all more clearly, clearer than ever before.
Julian Barnett is a choreographer, performer, arts advocate, and educator whose work lives in the space between bodies, ideas, and shared attention. Working collaboratively across disciplines, he creates performances that ask how empathy might be practiced and how transformation might be felt within social and political worlds. His research moves through movement, philosophy, musicology, science, and the supernatural, circling questions of intimacy in performance and returning often to his own mixed race identity as a site of inquiry, activism, and possibility.
His work has traveled widely, appearing throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Turkey, China, Japan, and across Europe. Julian has created work for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Ormao Dance Company, and has been invited by institutions and presenters including Danspace Project, Gibney Dance, Movement Research at Judson Church, The Joyce Theater in New York, Jacob’s Pillow in Massachusetts, Performática in Mexico, Tangente in Montreal, Kampnagel in Hamburg, Dansehallerne in Copenhagen, La Briqueterie CDC Val de Marne in France, Dansateliers in Rotterdam, La Visiva in Barcelona, Body Arts Lab in Tokyo, b12 in Berlin, and the i Dance Festival in Hong Kong, among others. His solo Clean State was a finalist in the Sadler’s Wells Global Dance Contest in London, and his evening length work Sound Memory was named one of Time Out New York’s Best Dances of 2009.
Julian has been a Resident Artist at K3 Tanzplan Hamburg, Springboard Danse Montréal, The Joyce Theater Foundation in New York, and the Bates Dance Festival in Maine. His work has been supported through numerous awards and grants, including a New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award nomination for Performance, a danceWEB scholarship at the Impulstanz Festival in Austria, a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant, and a US- Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, through the National Endowment for the Arts.
As a performer, Julian’s collaborations span a wide range of dance and theater practices. He was a founding member of Johannes Wieland’s New York company and later his company at Staatstheater Kassel. He performed in numerous works, including the duet Shift, created on him and awarded the Kurt Jooss Award in 2004, and appeared alongside the Pina Bausch Tanztheater at the 3 Wochen mit Pina Bausch Festival in Essen, Germany. Between 2002 and 2008, he was also a founding member of Larry Keigwin’s Keigwin and Company, while performing with Lar Lubovitch, Doug Elkins, Eun Me Ahn, Shapiro and Smith, Stefanie Nelson, Kevin Wynn, and Doug Varone at the Metropolitan Opera. His later collaborations include work with Jeanine Durning, Steve Paxton, Kota Yamazaki, Wally Cardona, and Takahiro Yamamoto, and ongoing creative relationships with Jocelyn Tobias, Abigail Levine, Laurel Jenkins, Bernard Brown, Julie Mayo, and Paul Besaw.
In theater, Julian has choreographed and staged productions at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Spoleto Festival, the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, and numerous off Broadway venues in New York City. As an actor, he has appeared in productions of The Who’s Tommy, Iphigenia in Taurus, and others, and has performed in films by Tori Lawrence, Janessa Clarke, Celia Rowlson Hall, and Jessica Brillhart.
As an educator, Julian is committed to fostering a culture of curiosity toward what dance and performance are, what they might become, and how they can function as tools for social activation, transformation, and personal growth. He shares his practices internationally through workshops at Gibney Dance in New York City, Dance Italia in Italy, the b12 Festival in Berlin, and Architanz in Tokyo, and has served as guest faculty at Princeton University, NYU Tisch, The Juilliard School, SUNY Purchase, California Institute for the Arts, Colby College, Middlebury College, and others. He is currently an Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Vermont, School of the Arts, where he teaches contemporary dance, improvisation, composition, and interdisciplinary studies.
Born in Tokyo, Japan, and raised in Northern California, Julian began dancing through breakdancing. He attended the Idyllwild Arts Academy before earning his BFA in Dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he also focused on Asian Cultural Studies and Documentary Filmmaking. During this time, he studied at SEAD Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance in Austria. He later completed the Master of Choreography Program, now the Master of Performance Practices, at ArtEZ University in Arnhem, Netherlands, and received his MFA in Dance from the University of the Arts Philadelphia in 2019.