Julie Bleha

Julie Bleha

Julie Bleha has had a long and varied career in education, the arts and non-profit management. She helped launch The School of The New York Times’ pre-college program, and prior to that, taught in pre-college programs at Barnard College, among others. Julie holds two MAs (Columbia University and King’s College, London) and an MPhil (Columbia), and has been a university instructor and adjunct professor at Columbia, Fordham, NYU, and The New School. She has been a guest lecturer and panelist at many artistic and academic institutions, and has served as dramaturg and literary manager for several notable New York City-based theater companies. In all of this, Julie has been an advocate for work by and representation of women and communities of color. 

A sixth-generation New Yorker, Julie has always been fascinated by the interplay of architecture, urban art and design, and the lives of city dwellers, especially as they relate to issues of immigrant life and social justice. As a child and adolescent Julie spent her summers in Montana on her grandparents’ cattle ranch, where she was exposed to a completely different culture in terms of landscape and architecture, food systems and economic development, human-animal interaction, and care for the environment. She still remembers feeling amazed and inspired by the flourishing plant life on the sod roofs of her family’s ancestral homestead cabins—her first exposure to green architecture. 

Julie believes making connections between urban, rural, educational and carceral architecture and landscape design; care for the environment; and social justice and creative expression as necessary for a thriving 21st century existence. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons.

Email: julie@onelab.org