Julia Bumke (she/her) is a new work dramaturg and creative producer who collaborates with composers, librettists, and playwrights at all stages of their careers. She is the Executive Director and in-house producer for JACK Music Inc., the nonprofit contemporary music organization behind JACK Quartet. Hailed by The New York Times as “our leading new-music foursome,” JACK and its nonprofit champion new string quartet music and the transformative experiences that it creates.
As a producer and dramaturg, Julia works with opera and theater artists to craft singular pieces. Recent/upcoming projects include premieres and workshops with AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), Penn Live Arts, 92Y, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Oberlin Conservatory, Opera Philadelphia, Curtis Institute of Music, PEAK Performances at Montclair State University, and others.
In 2022, Julia served as guest producer and co-curator of the Look + Listen Festival, an interdisciplinary new music and art festival in New York City. During the 2020-2021 season, she was the interim Artistic Director at Passage Theatre Company in Trenton, NJ, where she led online programming that spoke to the theater’s core values of inclusion, community, and empathy. She has been a grant panelist for the NY State Council for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and New Music USA’s Creator Fund; and has read for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, SPACE on Ryder Farm, and PlayPenn.
Prior to her work with JACK, Julia held administrative positions with Sō Percussion, PlayPenn, The Wilma Theater, Williamstown Theatre Festival, and the American Repertory Theater. She has also consulted about fundraising campaigns, grant writing, and strategic planning, with clients including BalletX, a contemporary ballet company specializing in world premieres; Emma’s Torch, which empowers refugees through culinary education; and Directors Gathering, a service organization for theater directors. Julia serves as President of the Board for the Bergamot Quartet, a female-led emerging contemporary music ensemble in New York City.
Julia received her A.B. from Princeton, and a dual M.F.A. degree in Dramaturgy from A.R.T.’s Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard and the Moscow Art Theater.
Artistic Statement
I believe in bringing creative artists back to their original intention for a piece: why this project now, and what sparked this curiosity in the first place? As a creator prepares for a world premiere, any number of financial and artistic decisions can compromise this founding impetus. By keeping their intention at the forefront of our conversations, I help artists create rigorous projects that are true to their core reason for being, leading to pieces that are as thorough as they are inventive.
I love working on projects that defy genres and push against form constraints to make something new. I’ve dramaturged everything from an opera with six trumpets, an eight-man chorus, and a tenor who plays both a lighthouse-keeper and the wife who haunts him; to a Yiddish-Cuban opera-musical-drama mash-up; to a project where the lead mezzo-soprano uses AutoTune and a vocoder to explore where humans end and robots begin. I’ve worked in museum galleries, cramped windowless studios, outdoor theaters, and 1,000-seat proscenium opera halls alike. Through them all, I find new work dramaturgy exhilarating because of its sheer lack of a road map. It lets me connect deeply with artists at their most vulnerable moments of creation, getting to the heart of each project and teasing out its singular path to success.
Julia Mauro Bumke 