Julia Rooney

Julia Rooney is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the space between analogue and digital media, gesturing towards a world in which the two tenuously coexist. While rooted in painting, her practice bridges other disciplines including papermaking, site-specific installation and collaborative projects. Her recent solo shows, Screen Shot (Jennifer Terzian Gallery, 2022) and @SomeHighTide (Arts+Leisure, 2021) featured a series of phone-sized and laptop-sized paintings installed both physically at the galleries and digitally on her eponymous Instagram account, which she intermittently reactivates for site-specific projects as an ongoing form of inquiry. 
 
In 2021–22, Rooney was a Happy and Bob Doran CT Artist-in-Residence through a partnership between Yale University Art Gallery and Artspace New Haven, during which time she researched the way social media, search engines and algorithmic technology is shaping patterns of thinking, making and communicating. Her ongoing series of paperworks, including paper paper and Scrollscape, have been exhibited at Artspace (New Haven, CT, 2022), the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC, 2021), Real Eyes Gallery (Adams, MA, 2021) and Kopeikin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA, 2019) and is currently on long-term loan at the Nature Conservancy in Connecticut. Using paper more tactilely, Rooney has been collaborating with her sister, poet Anne Marie Rooney, since 2011 using the US Postal Service as a medium for art production, distribution, exhibition and mapping of their own movement between the cities of New York, New Orleans, New Haven and Baltimore.



In 2022, Rooney was an Artist-in-Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans, LA) and was awarded a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist Community Engagement grant for her project Greenspace, Greenscreen. Previous residencies and/or teaching fellowships include More Art’s Engaging Artists (New York, NY, 2014–15), the Yale Prison Education Initiative (2018), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s SU CASA (New York, NY, 2019), the Studios at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA, 2021) and the DNA Artist Residency (Provincetown, MA, 2020–22). Rooney received her BA in Visual & Environmental Studies from Harvard College and her MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art.