Julie Tolentino (she/they interchangeably) is a Filipina-Salvadorean artist whose performance/installation practice explores the interstitial spaces of race, gender, relationality, and the archive. Expanding notions of durational, erotic practices, site, and movement, their collaborative projects include performance, installation, video, devised objects, scent, soundscapes, and texts drawn from essential outside learning spaces of activism, alterity, advocacy, loss, and caregiving.
Solo and group exhibitions include The New Museum The Kitchen, Participant, Inc., Performance Space New York, Aspen Art Museum, Nevada Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art-Macedonia, Thessaloniki Biennial, Pact Zollverein, House of World Cultures-Berlin, Theaterworks-Singapore, Papaya Arts-Manila, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions-LACE, The Lab, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, homeLA, Volume, the Bridge Project.
Interdisciplinary projects include 2022 Whitney Biennial, with Ivy Kwan Arce contributing a light and glass installation, durational performance (with Stosh Fila Robert Crouch) and a public program focused on the work of the What Would An HIV Doula Do? collective, Visual AIDS Duets book series with Kia LaBeija; Movements in Blue with the What Would An HIV Doula Do? Collective; Archive in Dirt 2018, the Lesbian AIDS Project Women’s Safer Sex Handbook with Cynthia Madansky; and The Sky Remains The Same, a lifetime body-as-archive project since 2006.
Recent awards include Joyce Award (2023); USArists International (2022); Anonymous was a Woman and the Herb Alpert/UCROSS Residency Prize (2021); Queer|Art Sustained Artist Recognition (2020); Fulcrum Arts Honoree, Foundation for Contemporary Art in Performance, a Herb Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship (2019) and multiple individual and collaborative commissions and inter/national grants, including the Mid-Atlantic Arts U.S. Artists International Grant, 2022.
Tolentino received an MFA as the Dean’s Distinguished Fellow at the University of California at Riverside’s in Experimental Choreography (2020). They initiated and ran the Clit Club from 1990-2002, Tattooed Love Child, and Dagger in New York City, was part of House of Color Video Collective, Art Positive, and WWHIVDD Collective. Since 2012, Tolentino has been the editor for the Provocations section of The Drama Review (TDR).
Appointments include the 2021-2022 Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Steinhardt; the Alma Hawkins Chair in the World Arts & Cultures Department at UCLA, Winter 2022, and is both a current and future Queer|Art Mentor - 2022-2024. Tolentino joined CalArts as permanent faculty in the Art Program in Fall 2022.
Tolentino is an artist/maker/contributor with Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.