Julie Woodard is a Philadelphia-based artist, educator, and self-described “doula of discarded things.” Working with repurposed materials, she creates impressionistic landscapes, multimedia installations, functional sculptures, and wearable works that weave together seemingly disparate ideas. Here, grief meets whimsy and waste becomes a site of possibility.

Textiles provide a common thread throughout Julie’s practice, linking intimate narratives to broader questions of memory, place, and human experience. She incorporates items inherited from three generations of her family alongside secondhand materials and post-consumer waste, transforming sentimental remnants and overlooked matter into tactile terrains and unexpected forms. This process becomes a way of holding on and letting go, as she explores loss, embodiment, architecture, and ecological change through the emotional and cultural lives of ordinary materials.

Julie integrates elements of printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, collage, painting and natural pigments, often using shifts in scale to explore relationships between the intimate and monumental, personal and environmental. She is also a songwriter, translating many of her visual pieces into song.

For over twenty years, Julie has worked across Philadelphia’s cultural sector as an educator, teaching in museums, schools, and community spaces, while designing and curating immersive art experiences with cultural and civic institutions like the University of the Arts, Delaware River Waterfront Corporation, Cannonball Festival,  Broad Street Love, FABSCRAP, Philadelphia Internationl Airport, and Da Vinci Art Alliance. She is a 2026 recipient of CFEVA’s New Courtland Artist Fellowship and will be an InLiquid’s Park Towne Place Artist in Residence in 2027. Julie holds a BA in American Studies from Temple University and an MA in Museum Education from the University of the Arts.

Current curatorial projects include The Hole Story, an ongoing exploration of creative reuse among over 25 local makers, and Good Grief, a November 2026 group exhibition that explores how grief shows up in the work of 7 Philadelphia-based artists.

Some of Julie's favorite commissions are projects where collectors provide personal artifacts to be workshopped into a framed piece or unique garment and is honored to help others pay tribute to special people, places, and occasions by breathing art into old things.

Collaborations, public projects, requests for workshops, and textile donations are welcome.