Rust Belt/ Bayou 
Rust Belt/ Bayou is an aural exploration of two cities: Cleveland, Ohio, and New Orleans, 
Louisiana. For the past several years, Christensen’s artistic practice has been based in
 extensive travel throughout the United States, surveying the ways in which communities are 
changing in the shadow of corporate real estate development. During these travels, 
she has often been struck by the similarities between Cleveland, a city of the Rust Belt, 
and New Orleans, a city of the bayou. Both cities dwell on the shores of bodies of water 
with global reach: Cleveland on Lake Erie, New Orleans on the Mississippi River. Both cities 
have seen the boom and bust of industry and population throughout their 
histories — past and present. Cleveland and New Orleans look remarkably different, 
but Christensen has often noticed that they have sounds in common: industry, 
birds, water, tourists. Rust Belt / Bayou offers an interactive document of 
aural snapshots from recent trips to both New Orleans and Cleveland.
Rust Belt / Bayou  is a comission from Turbulence.org/Networked Music Review
with funds from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State
Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors 

Big Box Reuse Website
The Big Box Reuse website first launched in 2004.  Since then, it has been named a 
Yahoo Pick of the Week, a Netscape Pick of the Day, and was on the San Francisco Bay Area
Guardian's list of "Best Arty Websites of 2006."  The website has been written about in 
the New York Times, the San Diego Union Tribune, Preservation Magazine of the National Trust,
and has been linked to by hundreds of sites, including Kottke, Eyebeam, the Walker Art Center,
Archinect, Interior Design Magazine, Treehugger, CBS, NBC, NPR, Good Magazine, Dwell Magazine,
the Center for Land Use Interpretation, The Atlantic Magazine, Readymade Magazine, and many more.

Big Box Reuse photographs
Photographs from the big box reuse series have shown at galleries 
and museums nationwide. Venues include: Center for Land Use Interpretation, 
Walker Art Center, Hite Art Institute (University of Louisville), Rensselaer 
Polytechnic Institute, The Sanctuary for Independent Media, Hudson Valley 
Teaching Gallery, Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, 
Carnegie Museum of Fine Arts, Yale University Architecture Galleries.

Disaster Studies 
Semeter-long collaboration with students at Stanford University. The project 
corincided with the 100 year anniversary of the San Francisco earthquare of
2006, which prompted extensive examination into the culture, remembrance,
life, and oddly, celebration, of disaster.  The earthquake commemoration was
used as a jumping off point to study current disasters that are happening
throughout the United States. The project culminated in a public intervention
at Stanford University, comparing Stanford's interpretation of earthquake
awareness with the public's unawareness of issues in New Orleans provoked
by Hurrican Katrina.

Blinking Girls
Blinking Girls is a video installation in which five seemingly separate videos are
projected from a single video source.  The five videos are mastered on to single 
video channel, which is then transferred to a DVD.  The sound is mastered on 
to a 5.1 matrix, and each video is linked to a single soundtrack.   Five structures 
are built to act as screens for the video projection, and a speaker is installed in 
each separate structure. In the end, the installation is a group of five sound-making,
video pieces projected in space, all mastered on to a single DVD.
The piece has shown in several locations, including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
and the Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville.

Megachurch Architecture
This series of photographs emerged from several visits to megachurches
as a part of the big box reuse research. The photographs, and associated
essays, explore the architecture of the megachurch. 

My Audience
My Audience is a video installation in which 4 video projectors are used
in order to project over 40 separate images into the seats of a concert hall.
The audience must stand on the stage in order to view the piece, and they are
faced with over 40 silent, staring, moving, large video faces gazing back at them.
The stage is covered in hidden microphones, and a Supercollider patch runs a slight 
delay on each sound course, and the sound is miked out over the house speakers.
In effect, the audience is standing on the stage, their movements making amplified
sound for the piece, and the video is sitting in the seats of the audience, 
patiently watching. 

Our Penultimate Year
Our Penultimate Year is a mini-series for radio by Jarred McAdams, which tells the cautionary
tale of the meteoric rise of a young man and woman who become king and queen of the world. 
It is the result of five years of intensive writing, composition, and rehearsal. It features Jarred as 
the King and his long-time collaborator Julia Christensen as the Queen. Our Penultimate Year debuted 
on Neighborhood Public Radio on May 6, 2006. Archived recordings of the NPR broadcasts of 
OPY are available at the NPR Website here. 
Additional clips can be found on Jarred's website, here.   

FMemory
FMemory was a collaboration between Michael Trigilio of Neighborhood Public Radio and the students 
in Julia's Transmission Arts Class.  Julia and her students built analog FM transmitters. Everyone made 
recordings of themselves telling stories about memories that they have, ranging about anything from 
food to early childhood to dreams to parties they had last week. Each of the transmitters––10 in all––were 
set up around the art complex at Oberlin College.  Each transmitter sent out a recording of a different memory 
on a different frequency.  Audience members brought portable radios, and wandered around the art building 
tuning around for the memory-frequencies.  In effect, memories were floating on the FM airwaves, and the 
audience members amplified them through the dozens of radios that they brought.   For pictures of the 
FMemory event, click here.  To read the class blog about the event, click here. (Neighborhood Public Radio was 
a guest on the Margin Release Lecture Series '08, produced by Julia Christensen at Oberlin College.)

Diversify or Decay: The Rust Belt Buckles
Land Arts in an Electronic Age is a class developed by Julia Christensen at Oberlin College.
During this class in 2008, Julia and Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation
took students on a field trip to Gary, Indiana.  While in Gary, the class explored the steelscape of the 
surrounding area in order to understand its history, the environment that hosts the steel industry, 
forming a deeper understanding of how that region connects to our lives around the world.
Students created an art exhibit derived from research prompted by the trip and the rest of the course,
and that documentation can be seen here.  The class website is here.

Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes
Walker Art Center/ DAP (Spring 2008) / ISBN-10: 0935640908
The suburbs have always been a fertile space for imagining both the best and the worst of modern social life. 
Portrayed alternately as a middle-class domestic utopia and a dystopic world of homogeneity and conformity--with 
manicured suburban lawns and the inchoate darkness that lurks just beneath the surface--these stereotypes 
belie a more realistic understanding of contemporary suburbia and its dynamic transformations. Organized by the
Walker Art Center in association with the Heinz Architectural Center at Carnegie Museum of Art, Worlds Away: New 
Suburban Landscapes is the first major museum exhibition to examine both the art and architecture of the 
contemporary American suburb. Featuring paintings, photographs, prints, architectural models, sculptures and 
video from more than 30 artists and architects, including Christophr Ballantyne, Julia Christensen, Center for 
Land Use Interpretation, Gregory Crewdson, Estudio Teddy Cruz, Dan Graham and Larry Sultan, Worlds Away 
demonstrates the catalytic role of the American suburb in the creation of new art and prospective architecture. The 
catalogue features new essays and seminal writings by John Archer, Robert Beuka, Robert Breugmann, David Brooks, 
Julia Christensen, Beatriz Colomina, Malcolm Gladwell and others, as well as a lexicon of suburban neologisms.

WAM! Women and Art Music Ensemble
Julia Christensen is the founder and director of WAM! : The Women and Art Music Ensemble at 
Oberlin Conservatory.  WAM! is a group of ten women playing music written by living women 
composers.  The mission of WAM! is to bring a unified voice to the women involved in 
new music at Oberlin, promoting and giving a platform for the talented young women in the ensemble.
The mission is also to increase public knowledge about the long tradition of women
involved in the worlds of new music, so that a male-dominated history of this relatively new field does not ensue. 
Ultimately, we intend to increase female enrollment in the new music field at Oberlin, by making 
very public that there are indeed women making art music at Oberlin, and playing the music of other women too.
Click the link to see bios and performance information.