Julia Kupiec

Julia is a Brooklyn based director of narrative and commercial work. The daughter of an architect and lighting designer, Julia grew up being carried around construction sites in a 5-gallon bucket. She ate her morning cereal with burly contractors, wiry electricians and frazzled, sleep-deprived parents who could never figure out where they put the drawings. It’s likely she was always destined to have too many opinions and a compulsion to critique every built environment she walks into even though absolutely nobody asked. When Julia decided she wanted to be a director, she thought she was rebelling against the family trade until she realized that films are a lot like buildings. They’re almost impossible to make, they take a huge amount of people and skill sets to put together, and to stand tall on their own, they require a vision that’s able to carry them through complications and setbacks, taking each curve ball and turning it into something that adds to the structural integrity, instead of wears it down. Julia doesn't remember a lot of the finished buildings from her youth but what she does remember is the ever-present movement towards them. For better or worse, that process of creation is the same barometer by which she’s come to measure her own life. Her mood is entirely dependent on the status of her next project and all of her friends are forced to cope with this hazardous fact. At 27, Julia has directed commercial work for clients such as Columbia Records, the US Air Force, UMass, and more. Last year she was shortlisted for the Young Director Award at Cannes and earned 8 nominations across three projects at the Berlin Commercial Film Festival. She’s developing her first feature documentary and is in pre production for a narrative short set to shoot later this year.