Spanning photography, drawing, and prose, the work of Julia Paull traces an arc between achingly personal, diaristic gestures of abstraction to meticulous documentation of contrived relationships with animals and the natural world.  In Paull’s work, the rendering of experience, or what the artist once referred to as “gestures of gestures,” is a way of making sense of the alternating banality and explosiveness of life.

Paull’s photographs are often of transient situations that speak to absence.  As an Artist in Residence at the Theodore Payne Foundation, she produced still life photographs depicting plants that function as crucial habitat for at risk Southern California butterflies. As a grant recipient of a USC Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences Initiative, Paull made photographs documenting the breeding of endangered species (Galapagos Islands, Costa Rica, Panama, and California.) Paull is a former resident at the Santa Fe Art Institute International Water Rights Residency, New Mexico, and The Hambidge Center, GA.  Recent solo exhibitions include, Drawn In Nature at Queens, LA, and the Santa Fe Art Institute, NM, Perfect Mason at Theodore Payne Foundation, Shadow Hills, CA, Double Life, Corridor 2122, Fresno, CA, and The Sum of the Sun, Calame Studios Presents, Los Angeles. Recent photographic contributions to publications include Saturday Morning: Notes from Now for Tomorrow and The Ark and Beyond Frogs in Glass Boxes.

Julia Paull received a BA from the University of California Santa Barbara and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. She is an Associate Professor of teaching and Chair of 4d at the USC Roski School of Art and Design.  In her spare time she likes to garden.