Julia Bradshaw is Associate Professor of Photography and New Media Communications at Oregon State University. She teaches all levels of photography classes, video art, landmarks in media content, and new media visualization. Her research interests center on the history and technology of photography with particular emphasis on art and data and art and the environment. She received her MFA from San José State University with an emphasis on photography and video art.
As an artist, Bradshaw photographs well-used institutional spaces. Previous research projects center on the material and production properties of photography and also flatness and abstraction in contemporary photography. Other projects are more responsive to her social environment such as being a foreigner or reading. Unable to separate the theoretical and the creative in her art practice, Bradshaw describes her projects in context of the work of other photographers and theorists engaged with similar concerns.
Bradshaw’s video-art and photography projects exhibit throughout the United States, The Netherlands, Poland, and Germany. Her artist book “Flying” is in the Getty Research Collection. Her print “Working Back-Up” is in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco collection and the Oakland Museum of Art.
As an arts organizer, Bradshaw was a board member for the Society for Photographic Education from West region from 2010 - 2012 and co-organized two regional conferences in Oakhurst (2009) and in San Diego (2010). In 2017, she was the Chair of the Society of Photographic Education North West region conference hosted by Oregon State University. In 2007 she worked as the volunteer coordinator for the ZER01 arts and technology festival in San José. She was also the founding member and organizer of the Book Arts Jam in 2002 and 2003 in the Bay Area – an event now in its seventeenth year.
As a curator, Bradshaw organized a number of exhibitions in California and in Oregon. In 2017, she curated “Totality” a group exhibition of artworks concerned with our human relationship to Space; this coincided with the 2017 solar eclipse at Fairbanks Gallery in Corvallis, Oregon. Also in 2017, she curated or organized a series of exhibitions in conjunction with the SPENW regional conference. Of note was the exhibition of work by Christopher Russell and Rafael Soldi at the Corvallis Art Center and Nicole Jean Hill and Alexis Pike at Fairbanks Gallery on the Oregon State University campus. In 2011, she assembled an exhibition on the topic of “Air-Travel” at Corridor 2122 in Fresno, which included works by Hasan Elahi, Aaron Koblin, t.w. five, Stephen Dent, Stephen Chalmers, Leslie Batty, and Jonathan Brilliant. From 2000 – 2004 she assisted in the curation of several book-arts exhibitions in the Bay Area.
As a writer, Bradshaw published several reviews in afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Criticism and wrote over twenty articles for the online blog ArtShift San José. Her research essay on the photography in the Fresno Feminist Art Program was published in Exposure, The Journal of the Society for Photographic Education.