Meet Trailblazer Julie Rada

Today we’d like to introduce you to Julie Rada.

Julie, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
It’s really difficult to sum up my journey. My life as a young person was characterized by a “both/and” dynamic. There was a lot of family fighting, chaos, and verbal abuse and there was a lot of love, family support, and comfort. There were both trustworthy and untrustworthy adults in my life. Grown-ups who were both present and absent. I lived in a middle-class neighborhood that was next door to a tougher neighborhood and still managed to be considered the “wrong side of the tracks” for some. I had relative privilege compared to my neighborhood peers and then when I moved schools, I learned I had little, by comparison. I felt insulated and exposed. Protected and, at the same time, too grown-up and with a lot of street smarts for my age. It was both…and…

I was a precocious kid, reading full chapter books by kindergarten and announcing that I was going to be an astronaut and a paleontologist and President of the United States to anyone who would listen. I read a lot, staying up late in my bedroom, reading a book a night. I was infinitely curious. I also had a bad speech problem and felt so frustrated that the world could not understand my big ideas. Fortunately, my parents enrolled me in speech therapy and I eventually got to where I could speak openly and without embarrassment. But there were a few quiet years where I soaked my world in like a sponge. I tested into the gifted program in 2nd grade and in 5th grade, I went to the library and selected the colleges I wanted to attend. Precocious.

When I was nine years old, my mom registered me in a summer theatre program. I had one line in the melodrama There’s Love in Them There Hills. I caught the bug. From that point forward, I did every single theatre program, dance class, singing group, and show I could find. I jammed my schedule full. From the time I was ten through 14, the longest period I had off between projects was two weeks, rehearsing or performing at night after school and every weekend. It was a great diversion for me as my parents underwent a nasty divorce and my family fragmented in a number of ways. But the theatre was my home and my solace. I knew I wanted to go to New York City, study acting, and live my dream.

Along the way to college, I went to an arts high school, a dreamland of weirdos and outcasts. I found my artistic voice, produced and directed plays, did a 45-minute solo performance, and generally developed a community of like-minded creative humans that reflected back to me my values. I discovered somewhere along the line that I was queer. And my non-heteronormativity started to shape my worldview.

I ended up going to three different undergraduate colleges, in spite of how self-directed I was at the age of 10. I fell in and out of love, studied Buddhism, got a yoga teacher training certificate, became a feminist and, correspondingly, developed a sense of intersectional social justice that drives much of my ethics today. Two major events happened when I lived in New York City. One was September 11th. It shook me to my core and made existential angst a lifelong friend. The other was the Amadou Diallo verdict, in which four white NYPD officers were acquitted of shooting an unarmed black man in his own building 42 times. The profound injustice of this moment left a mark on me. I started to examine the dark history of racial injustice in this nation since its inception and all its current manifestations today. I turned my focus to mass incarceration and got curious about how the arts, specially, my art form of theatre, might intervene on incarceration in the United States.

My road continued to be winding. I ended up in Colorado, working nonstop as a social worker with adults with cognitive disabilities and working full time with The LIDA Project Experimental Theatre Company. I started making my own theatre and performance artwork in earnest and started directing original ensemble-based experimental theatre productions. I did this for some time until I realized that I needed to get more education to move forward in my life and career. I am a first-generation college student, essentially. I had no direction and no clear idea of what it would be like to get a terminal degree, but I took a leap and ended up in an MFA program for Theatre Performance. And there, finally, I figured out how to do what I had been dreaming about doing for about 11 years at that point: I started doing theatre and performance in prisons.

My entre into this world was through the ASU Prison English Program at Florence State Prison and simultaneously with Humanities Behind the Walls at Perryville State Prison, both in Arizona. With these programs as a base, I developed my own program for working with people inside, cultivated our shared stories into performances that reflected back our collective humanity and shared these voices with the world. I thought I was destined for a life in academia and took a two-year faculty fellowship at the University of Utah, teaching, directing and developing another prison-based theatre program at Draper Prison, then moved back to Colorado in 2016.

Since I’ve been back, I’ve been adjunct teaching at a number of local colleges, freelance directing, and I started working in Colorado prisons in 2017. In early 2018, I co-created an ensemble-based performance program at Sterling Prison with a colleague, Misty Saribal. In early 2019, I started teaching with the University of Denver’s Prison Arts Initiative (DU PAI), founded by Ashley Hamilton. Together we worked on a performance of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at Sterling that received much media attention and I officially joined Ashley as Director of Programming for DU PAI in late August 2019. I am in my dream job, created theatre inside and outside of prisons walls, with all kinds of artists, incarcerated and free and I couldn’t be happier…and I still never stopped reading books constantly and I rarely take weekends off!

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
It wasn’t smooth at all, but I value the challenges I faced more than the opportunities in many ways. My journey was much more non-linear than I expected. I am not inclined to give advice; everyone’s paths are so different. I would encourage young women to stay the course and not be discouraged by adversity. I would also encourage them to always follow through on what you say you’re going to do. This is a practice I live by. If I say I’ll make something happen, I’ll make it happen. I follow up, I respond, I fulfill my commitments. And I would also urge them to invest in community and relationships. I strive to be the person people call when they’re in a bind because they know I will deliver. I try to always say thank you, connect people I care about with opportunities I know they will love, and share/give credit. It’s genuine for me. I really, really like people. It’s easy for me to connect with people and become invested in them, so my relationships are not transactional. I genuinely want the best for the humans in my world. I am curious about their lives from a holistic point of view, not just what they can do for me or their careers or connections. I hope to spread mutual positive regard, kindness, and respect wherever I go!

We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
I specialize in community-based arts. I am deeply committed to the expressive possibility of all humans. I think all people are creative inherently and that all humans crave an outlet for our voices to be heard. I have created theatre with young folks experiencing homelessness, adults with a range of physical and cognitive disabilities, a man dying in hospice, kindergartners and teens and everything in between. I have created exquisite art with and alongside so many people individuals of all genders who are incarcerated. At this point, I specialize in facilitating performance/theatre-based experiences for all people.

What I most proud of is carrying a sense of aesthetics into all that I do and I don’t care what community a person is from, I am certain we can develop something beautiful together. I sense that after people spend time with me, they feel seen, heard, and understood. I hope that I reflect back human dignity with all people. Echoing the words of one of my mentors, Alan Gomez, I think what I do best is I create spaces of possibility.

Do you have any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general? What has worked well for you?
My advice for finding a mentor is that you offer something to this person. I remember a woman named Kathy Randels who I did a workshop with when I was 21. She is one of the founders of ArtSpot Productions in New Orleans and she did prison work and community-based physical and experimental theatre that rocked my world. I followed her career (pre-social media) and was desperate to get her to mentor me. I didn’t know what I could offer so I asked if I could file papers for her or wash her dishes. People’s knowledge is hard-earned and may have cost them a great deal. It’s wise to acknowledge that sharing their knowledge with you is a gift. When I finally found my mentor, Brian Freeland from The LIDA Project, I hope that I offered him what I could. I know a gave a lot of sweat equity to the projects we dreamed up and executed together. In return, he gave me so many countless opportunities and believed in me. And to find a man (a straight white man, eight years my senior—simply not the person I would have imagined) who treated me as an equal, who never doubted my capacity to wield power tools, lift heavy objects, navigate important high-pressure meetings, or puzzle out an artistic problem was a gift I didn’t know I needed, but one I will treasure forever. Even at 40, I consider him one of my mentors and we are good friends to this day. He never underestimated me and I never let him down. That seems like a good rule of thumb for a mentorship relationship!

As for networking, well, I would reiterate that I am invested in relationships. I care very little about the status of a person’s job or role. I am much more concerned about how they treat others. Sometimes you have to schmooze and network and self-promote. Unfortunately, it’s part of the territory. It makes me totally uncomfortable. So I simply try to be as authentic as I can with folks, ask them questions about their lives, and try to be as fully human with them, regardless of what they can do for me as possible. I have witnessed other people social climb and sometimes succeed on a much faster timeline than me. I suspect that I am somewhat terrible at playing “the game” of networking, but I feel confident in my professional relationships overall and feel valued. I think I might be a late bloomer professionally, but I am happy to be on a slower clip, shaping my own work and destiny, and feeling a sense of freedom. I don’t feel beholden to anyone, but I feel that I want to honor those who’ve put their trust in me and do work in the world that reflects integrity and possibility…

Which women have inspired you in your life?
This is really tough. I think I could go on and on. I had a handful of teachers who believed in me and gave me extra time and attention. My mother has always been so supportive, but also hands-off, which I appreciate. My mom is pretty un-sentimental and has never engineered my success. She has just cheered me along the way and validated my experience generally. But she never meddled and I am ultimately really grateful for that as I’ve been incredibly independent throughout my life and secure that my accomplishments were achieved, usually, through my own hard work (acknowledging, of course, that there are great structural inequities that may have been invisible, but operating to give me a leg-up as well!). Also, my mom is going to community college for the first time and it is so inspiring!

I have so many powerful women in my world. My sister is a nurse. My social circle—friends and even influential ex-girlfriends—is packed with teachers, school counselors, therapists, social workers, librarians, community-based workers, artists. With my work at DU PAI, I am surrounded by Ashley and all the other women of our team who are so committed to the incarcerated artists with whom we work. All of these are people putting in the work, in some of the most un-glamorous unglorified ways to make the world a better place, relationship by relationship. I have tremendous respect for the women in my life.

In terms of public figures, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention what an important role Ani DiFranco played in my life. I discovered her music when she was still relatively underground when I was 17. She is ten years older than me. She set an example for what it meant to be unapologetically clever, to stand up for what you believe, to resist the pressures of authority and capitalism, and to be an independent artist in the world. She was politically active and seemed to live her politics in all the ways the “personal is political.” She wasn’t about physical image, she was about created change, speaking her truth, and being fierce. I really don’t know who I would’ve become if it weren’t for her influence—both her music and lyrics, as well as her public image—on my world at the exact right time. I needed a role model and, as role models go, she was a damn fine one!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.julierada.com, www.grapefruitlab.com
• Email: julie@grapefruitlab.com

Image Credit:
Erin Preston, Matthew Ragan, Jeff Lane, James Dumas, Miriam Suzanne

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