Julia B. Rosenblatt is a playwright, theater educator, and Theater of the Oppressed (TO) practitioner. Her musical Group! (lyrics by Eloise Govedare, music by Aleksandra Weil) premiered at Passage Theatre Company in May 2022, and her one-act play Can’t Make This Sh*t Up debuted in December 2022 at The Tank as part of the Science In Theatre Festival. Julia is the Theater Program Coordinator and Associate Professor at CT State Community College, Capital in Hartford, CT. She was the Co-Founding Artistic Director of the award-winning HartBeat Ensemble for 16 years.
HartBeat is an award-winning ensemble theater company whose mission is to create provocative theater that connects the community beyond traditional barriers of class, race, geography, and gender. As Co-Founding Artistic Director, Julia co-wrote and performed in Graves (2001), News to Me (2004), Ebeneeza–A Hartford Holiday Carol (2006), The Pueblo (2007), and Rich Clown, Poor Clown, Beggar Clown, Thief (2008). In 2011, Julia wrote the critically praised Flipside, which received the 2012 Best New Ensemble Work at the NY International Fringe Festival. In 2016, she wrote HartBeat’s critically acclaimed Gross Domestic Product, a full-length musical that explores motherhood in the "post-feminist” era and its relationship to our country’s economy.
In 2018, Julia was a Graustein Memorial Fund Playwriting Fellow and a Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame “Women Center Stage” Honoree. She won a Smith & Kraus Spotlight Award for Best 10 Minute Plays of 2019 and was nominated for the 2018 MFA Playwrights Workshop at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
In 2015 and 2016, Julia was the Playwriting Consultant at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center where she worked with the museum’s interpretive staff, project specialists, and media consultants to create a new tour that uses theater to focus on Stowe’s life as an activist writer.
In addition to her playwriting and performance work, Julia is a Theater of the Oppressed (TO) practitioner and has facilitated TO events and workshops throughout the United States, Nicaragua, and Mexico. She has developed a unique approach to civic learning while teaching theater skills at a high level, which has evolved into HartBeat’s nationally recognized Youth Play Institute (YPI). Along with her co-founders, Julia developed the Neighborhood Investigative Project, a unique system for gathering large sets of narratives that enable communities to put their own stories into context.
Julia is often asked to speak about her work and the role of theater in social justice movements. She has given presentations at NYU Steinhardt, The Mark Twain House and Museum, The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, University of Hartford, University of Saint Joseph, and Charter Oak State College’s Shea Lecture among others.
Through her work with HartBeat Ensemble as well as an individual artist, Julia has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the National Endowment for the Arts New Works award, The Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, the Puffin Foundation and the Connecticut Office of the Arts. She is a recipient of the 2009 New Boston Fund Individual Artist Award, The Connecticut Office of the Arts (COA) 2013 Artist Fellowship Award, and the Hartford Courant’s 2015 Hometown Hero Award.
Julia holds a BA from UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and an MFA in Playwriting from Spalding University.
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