Described as an “incandescent” (Musicworks), “captivating Moravian magician” (Downbeat), Julia Úlehla is an interarts performer, composer, scholar, and cultural worker whose critical and creative practices engage ancestry, traditional culture, and radical forms of experimentation. Her practice is rooted first and foremost in the embodied voice—as a powerful nexus of the material, spiritual, ethno-cultural, and socio-political.
Early in her career, Julia trained as an opera singer, completing a BA in Music (Vocal Performance) at Stanford University and an MMus in Vocal Performance and Literature at the Eastman School of Music. She left classical singing to become a member of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, a laboratory theatre company in Pontedera, Italy where renowned director Jerzy Grotowksi engaged in a phase of embodied research known as “Art as Vehicle.” After leaving the Workcenter, Julia relocated to New York City to have a child and began collaborations with composer/saxophonist Darius Jones as an original member of his Elizabeth-Caroline Unit. Soon after she moved to Vancouver and completed a PhD in Ethnomusicology at UBC. Her doctoral research-creation focused on “living song” vis-a-vis an ancestral song tradition carried by generations of her family members. As a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Cultural Studies at Queens University, her subsequent research-creation project explored the “extra-rational” possibilities of the voice, extending the theoretical account of “living song” into ethical praxis, and developing methods for voice, movement, text, image, theatre, and installation in a community of collaborative artists. Julia’s embodied research spans performance disciplines and milieus including devised and laboratory theatre, experimental and creative music, installation, opera, oratorio, cabaret, new music, musical theatre, dance and movement research, traditional music and folklore, ethnography, and improvisation.
As a vocal performer, improviser, and composer she has performed at the Monheim Triennale, FIMAV (Victoriaville), Colours of Ostrava, Vancouver International Jazz Festival, Vancouver Folk Festival, BAM Fisher, P.S. 1, Festival de Arte Sacra, Old Town School of Folk Music, Stràźnice International Folklore Festival, Folk Holidays, Bimhuis, Palac Akropolis, Western Front, and many others. Julia is currently vocalist and creative director of the critically acclaimed avant-folk ensemble Dálava, with whom she regularly performs throughout North America and Europe. As a composer and vocalist, she has recorded on Pi Recordings (2025), Songlines Recordings (2017), and Sanasar Records (2014).
As an actress and deviser, she has performed at the Grotowski Institute (Wrocław), Teatro Era, Baryshnikov Arts Center, SFMOMA, the Performance Art Institute, Playwrights Theatre Centre, Palazzo Ducale, Fabbrica Europa Festival, Villa Romana, Sirenos Festival, New York Live Arts, BRIC, Movement Research at The Judson Church, Danspace, La Fonderie, and others.
In addition to a private teaching studio, she has led workshops, colloquia, term courses, and guest lectures in theatre and music departments at Stanford University, Yale University, Sapienza Universitá di Roma, University of Torino, The Graduate Center at CUNY, Masaryk University, Capilano University, SFU Woodward’s, University of Minnesota, and at theatre companies such as SITI Company, LAVA Studios, Leimay, Teatro Akropolis, the Grotowski Institute, Divadlo Continuo, and many others.
Her scholarship has appeared in the journals Performance Matters (2023) and Ethnomusicology Translations (2018), as a co-authored chapter in Research and Reconciliation: Unsettling Ways of Knowing through Indigenous Relationships(2019), and at academic colloquia including the Society for Ethnomusicology, Analytical Approaches to World Music, British Forum for Ethnomusicology, International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, Great Lakes Associate for Sound Studies, From Folklore to World Music.
In addition to her work as a performer and deviser, Julia currently teaches as a Sessional Lecturer in UBC’s School of Music. She recently completed a curatorial position of Artistic Associate at Music on Main Society, where she worked to develop a platform for Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh artists and for community-engaged programming. She lives as an uninvited guest on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.