Julia Christensen is an artist and writer whose work explores systems of technology, time, change, and memory. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (Fine Arts, 2018), LACMA Art + Tech Lab Fellowship (2017-2018), Creative Capital Fellowship (Emerging Fields, 2013), MacDowell Fellowship (2015), and the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award (2015). She has been awarded artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Wexner Center for the Arts Film + Video Studio, Media Archaeology Lab, and the Experimental Television Center. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Gallery, NYC; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Cleveland, OH; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; and internationally. She is the author of Big Box Reuse (MIT Press, 2008), a book about communities that reuse abandoned Walmart and Kmart stores in the United States, which won the American Association of Academic Press’s Book of the Year Award in trade non-fiction. Her forthcoming book, Upgrade Available (Dancing Foxes Press), is a product of her long-term art/research project about how “upgrade culture” impacts life on a range of time scales. She is Associate Professor of Integrated Media in the Studio Art Department at Oberlin College.
Artwork: Julia Christensen, Upgrade to Proxima B. Ongoing. Notes and photographs from the project.