Julia Hollander

Author and workshop leader

Julia Hollander was born in Bristol in 1965. After studying Philosophy and English Literature at Cambridge University she became a staff director at English National Opera. Her work as assistant to David Pountney and Nick Hytner took her all over the world. In 1991 she was the first ever woman director to stage a show at ENO, and went on to direct two more major opera productions for that company before branching out into freelance work and founding her own contemporary music theatre company, Operate. During this period, she also worked as a professional freelance choral singer.

After starting a family in 1999, she gradually pulled away from opera work and turned to teaching. She has taught in the major London conservatoires and design colleges, covering all sorts of skills related to opera - theatre design and history, stagecraft and vocal technique. Having trained in vocal pedagogy with Janice Chapman at the Guildhall, she now earns a living as a singing coach and teacher in Oxford, where she is also a chorister and soloist with numerous ensembles and groups there. She specialises in singing with people suffering from dementia and other neurological disorders, and collaborates with the vocal rehabilitation unit at the John Radcliffe hospital.

Julia’s writing career has always run alongside her singing work. It began with translations and adaptations of opera libretti, and collaboration on new commissions. After attending a script writing course with Kenith Trodd and Rob Rich at the NFTS, she wrote two film scripts and two plays for Radio 4: When the Bough Breaks and The Kingsnorth Six. Her journalism has included travel writing for the Sunday Telegraph, numerous book and stage reviews for Classical Music and Opera Now magazines, blogs and features for the Guardian.

Julia’s five published books are: Journey through Campsfield (the result of a writing residency at Campsfield Immigration Detention Centre), Indian Folk Theatres (part of Routledge’s Theatres of the World series, deriving from more than a decade’s work with indigenous performers in India), When the Bough Breaks (a personal memoir published by John Murray), Chicken Coops for the Soul (for Guardian Books) and Why We Sing (Atlantic). She is currently writing a novel based on untold stories in the maternal line of her family.

juliahollander.com