Born in the Riverside-area of Toronto and raised in Mississauga by Hoklo and Vietnamese refugees, Julie Phan splits her time between Toronto and Montreal as a theatre-maker, arts manager and stripper. Julie’s writing is openly hostile, characterized by her aggressive tone, off-beat sense of humor and frenetic lines of thought to explore agency, relationality and power. In particular, Julie’s work integrates her frustrations associated with her lived experience as a Vietnamese-Chinese woman into expressions of violence and the grotesque: she uses experimental art making, postdramatic storytelling and non-hierarchical theatre development processes as vessels for exploring fractured identities, bodily autonomy and structural dynamics. Despite her rage, an unexpected tenderness comes from the heart of Julie’s work: her unique somatic insights from dance performance informs her intimate understanding of people, allowing her to connect audiences to a sense of responsibility and the truth. Julie’s commitment to creating honest work is motivated by the desire to facilitate meaningful dialogue towards building values alignment and trust between and within communities.

Her early promise earned her recognition and support from the theatre community, beginning at fifteen when she developed her first play through Tarragon Theatre’s Young Playwrights Unit in 2016. Over the past eight years, Julie’s idiosyncratic artistic vision has continued to be shaped through mentorship, training and residencies with Paprika Festival, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Soulpepper, and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

At the age of seventeen, Julie won the opportunity to perform her first play at the 2018 Toronto Fringe through the Culturally Diverse Artist Project (CDAP) category; leading a team of five senior students and recent graduates from The Woodlands School, Julie premiered Fine China, a play that explores relational dynamics and intergenerational trauma within a family marked by the Vietnam War. The impact of this play led her to win the Teenjur Young Critics Award and the Robert Beardsley Award for Young Playwrights from Playwrights Guild of Canada in 2019. She also went on to stage a production presented by fu-GEN asian canadian theatre at Factory Theatre as part of their 18/19 season.

Julie continued to push boundaries around content and form with CPC Barbie– exploring idealized womanhood through the lens of seventy years of Communist Party rule in China, through socio-political satire and the deconstruction and reconstruction of Barbie dolls as marionettes. CPC Barbie won the Major Matt Mason Collective's Wildfire National Playwriting Competition in 2021, and is slated for a digital production in 2024.

In 2021, Julie was invited by Buddies in Bad Times Theatre to develop Never Walk Alone. where she continues her work to this day as a residency artist. The solo-theatre-pole dance piece, based on Julie’s experiences around the economics of intimacy in strip club ecology and the dialectic of authenticity moves between an explicitly narrative expression of her experiences through text and a more somatic and sensorial inquiry through dance. Her artistic work and her deepening connection to community earned her the Queer Emerging Artist Award in 2021. Her time at Buddies also included an internship in Artistic Producing under Daniel Carter over the 22/23 season to support her commitment to building capacity for organizational leadership and conversations around transforming the institutional status quo.

Julie was awarded the Young Canadian Playwright Award in 2022, by the Jon Kaplan Legacy Fund following her departure from school and ahead of her re-emergence in Toronto’s theatre scene: this recognition affirmed her practice and growing body of work as a distinctive, and powerful vision for the future of theatre.

Julie was recently awarded the Tarragon RBC Emerging Playwright Prize and residency in 2023, and will be developing her play The Imperial Housewives of the Forbidden City through their support.

Though her primary practice has been in theatre, Julie’s practice is expanding to areas in puppetry, dance, film, music, academia and design. Julie currently manages Toronto-based multidisciplinary digital and live performance collective PNSNV, and Montreal-based record label The GunShop. Currently in development for Julie are five stage plays, a video series, and a diss track.

Siminovitch Theatre Foundation, RBC Foundation through RBC Emerging Artists - Siminovitch Protégée Prize, 2023 (selected by David Yee)

Tarragon Theatre - RBC Emerging Playwright Award, 2023

Jon Kaplan Legacy Fund - Award for Young Canadian Playwright, 2022

Buddies in Bad Times Theatre - Queer Emerging Artist Award, 2021

Major Matt Mason Collective - Wildfire National Playwriting Competition, First Prize, 2021 (CPC Barbie)

Playwrights Guild of Canada - SureFire List, 2021 (Fine China)

Playwrights Guild of Canada- Tom Hendry Awards - Robert Beardsley Award, Winner, 2019 (Fine China)

Toronto Fringe - Teenjur Award for teen-approved show, 2018 (Fine China)

Woodlands Theatre Co. - NTS Ontario Drama Festival 2018 (Fine China) - Award of Excellence: Writing, South Peel District ; Sears Ontario Drama Festival 2016 (Hope) Award of Excellence: Writing, District, Regional; Outstanding Production Award, District

See list of press items here

e: jul533585@gmail.com

ig: @juxphan

Julie Phan passe en mode gobelin. Écrivaine-interprète, gestionnaire en arts et strip-teaseuse, Julie fait le va-et-vient entre Toronto et Montréal. Ses textes ouvertement hostiles, marqués de son ton agressif, son sens de l'humour décalé et ses réflexions frénétiques emblématiques, explorent le libre arbitre, le relationnalisme et les luttes de pouvoir en tant que femme vietnamienne-hoklo; tout en puisant, en contre-pointe, dans sa compréhension intime des gens et dans les découvertes somatiques issues de son expérience en performance chorégraphique.

Son œuvre en tant qu’écrivaine a été reconnue par la Guilde des dramaturges du Canada (Prix Robert Beardsley 2019), le Major Matt Mason Collective (Wildfire National Playwriting Competition, 2021), le Jon Kaplan Legacy Fund (Young Canadian Playwright Award, 2022) et le Tarragon Theatre (RBC Emerging Playwright Award, 2023). Julie est surtout connue pour avoir déçu son père, ainsi que pour son travail avec la fu-GEN asian theatre company (double bill, fearless).

Elle est actuellement artiste en résidence au Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.