JULIE LICHTENBERG

Julie Lichtenberg, theater and visual artist, has worked in community settings as a teacher, performer, and director, incorporating visual art with physical theater since 1980. She has taught graduate and undergraduate visual art, performed with Beholders Puppet Theater, studied with Tony Montanero, Sigfrido Aguilar in Mexico, and collaborated with Teatro Mito y Realidad in Chicago.

In 2000, Lichtenberg, along with Amie Dowling, co-founded the Performance Project. The mission of the Performance Project is to create theater that examines systems of oppression that are contributing factors to the high rates of addiction, incarceration, and recidivism of people living in communities facing economic and racial oppression in the United States.   The organization accomplishes its mission by creating and performing works of movement and theater with men and women in jail, those who have been released from jail, and professional artists.

Since its inception, the Performance Project has produced six original plays, piloted a bi-lingual soap opera at the Hampshire Jail, led theater workshops for women at the Hampden County Correctional Center in Ludlow, Massachusetts, held workshops at Department of Youth Services facilities, and established the Performance Company, an 'outside' ensemble comprised mostly of members who have been incarcerated who collaborate with professional artists in the community.

In 1995, along with Elsa Menendez, Lichtenberg co-founded BOOM!theater,   a multi-media performance workshop based in a men's medium-security prison in Connecticut. In the BOOM!theater workshop, Lichtenberg and Menendez developed a collaborative process involving theater, writing, music, visual art and movement. In three and a half years BOOM! created and performed four pieces, which every BOOM! member proudly claimed authorship of. Each piece was performed in the prison between three and six times for audiences of up to 80 inmates, and 25 "outside" guests.

Lichtenberg's other work has included the creation of visual art projects and designing art program curricula for at-risk groups of youth. At the Center for Urban Education, Research, and Development in Chicago, she designed and taught the art component of their interdisciplinary Project CANAL (Creating a New Approach to Learning). In the third year of the program, 50 seventh graders collectively made a 12-minute animated film. For eight years, she designed and taught the art program at Genesis School, an alternative school in Chicago for youth-at-risk. She also organized exhibitions of youth's work in Chicago at the University of Illinois' Gallery 400 and the Near Northwest Arts Council Gallery. In Connecticut, while teaching in the prisons, she brought her students' artwork to the town library and local gallery. In 1995, she collaborated with kids in Holyoke, Mass. to create a mural inside the community space of their housing complex, and created NO COMMENTS 'TILL THE END, an original theater work, with teens in Easthampton, Mass.

Lichtenberg holds a BFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and a MFA, from the University of Illinois, Chicago.