Julie-Anne Long is an award winning dance artist based in Sydney, Australia. Since graduating from the Victorian College of Arts in the early 1980s she has performed and choreographed on a wide range of projects with companies such as Human Veins, One Extra, Theatre of Image, Flying Fruit Fly Circus, Bell Shakespeare Company, Open City and Dance Works. From 1991-1996 Julie-Anne was Associate Artistic Director of One Extra Company with Artistic Director Graeme Watson. She has worked in a variety of dance contexts as mentor, dramaturg, curator and producer including Acting Director of dance research organisation Critical Path (2006/2007) and Dance Curator at Campbelltown Arts Centre (2009/2010).
For more than a decade Julie-Anne’s dance practice has focused on solo work. In early 2002 she had a successful solo show MissXL at the Seymour Centre, Sydney, which consisted of three solo works Mrs Whippy, in and around a Mr Whippy van, Cleavage and Leisure Mistress. Following this season Julie-Anne and videomaker Samuel James made a short dance film MissXL: let the dance speak for itself, which was a ReelDance International Festival of Dance on Screen finalist (2002), nominated for an Australian Dance Award (2003) and shown on the Australian Dance Film program at the 2003 Melbourne Festival. In 2005 Julie-Anne was awarded an Australian Dance Award ‘Outstanding Achievement in Independent Dance’ for the site-specific daytime event in and around the historic village of Hill End and an evening vaudeville performance at The Royal Hall, Hill End, The Nuns’ Picnic and in 2006 the ‘Award for Dance on Film’, at the 2006 Australian Dance Awards, for the film Nun’s Night Out from the same project. Long has experience working in site-specific contexts including Mrs Whippy, The Nun’s Picnic, and Benched in collaboration with Martin del Amo, for the Sydney Festival 2013.
In 2007 Julie-Anne was awarded an Australia Council Dance Fellowship, which encompassed research, development and the realisation of a body of work entitled The Invisibility Project, exploring and heightening the visibility of the older female performing/dancing body. This project included the 2012 solo Something In The Way She Moves: everyday dances for an invisible woman, and a new performance work outside of a conventional theatrical context, Now You See Her, a performance party in people’s homes.
Julie-Anne is currently Lecturer in Dance and Performance in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University. She holds a PhD from the UNSW titled Walking in Sydney Looking for Dancing: an auto-ethnographic mapping of the place of independent dance (2010) and an MA (Hons) in Performance UWS
Nepean The Leisure Mistress Dances: an investigation of a practice where fact and fiction collide (1999).
Her research interests include: identity and the performing female body; art and the everyday; collaborative art practices; participatory performance practices; the experience of place and the animation of space; site-specificity and performance and the relationship between writing and performance.