About

Since 2007, Jessica Jane Julius has actively maintained a hybrid practice that balances individual artistic exploration with community centric collaborative work.

Individual

Jessica Jane Julius is a contemporary artist whose work exists in the space between perception and materiality, where language dissolves into gesture and disorder. Engaging glass, installation, performance, and experimental mark-making, her practice destabilizes fixed systems of meaning, exposing the slippages and interruptions that shape our understanding of the world. By embracing the instability of language and material, Julius interrogates how communication is constructed, distorted, and reassembled. Her work resists resolution, inviting viewers into an active process of deciphering and engagement, where meaning is fluid, contingent, and always in flux.

Her recent bodies of work explore trauma, transformation, and connection through labor-intensive, process-driven techniques. Using glass as a central material—at times sharp and luminous, fragile and resilient—Julius often constructs poetic objects, wall-based pieces, and immersive environments that reflect personal and collective vulnerabilities. Her practice is rooted in research and reflection, often incorporating text, repetition, and fractured narrative forms to question how identity and experience are shaped through systems of memory, grief, and social context. She often works at the intersection of private ritual and public engagement, creating works that are both intimate and participatory.

Julius has been dedicated for over two decades to the arts as an artist, educator, collaborator, and performer. She is currently Associate Professor and Program Head of Glass at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate students and leads sustainability initiatives within the glass program. She served as President of the Glass Art Society, contributing to the international advancement of the field.

Her work has been exhibited widely at institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Glass (Tacoma), Heller Gallery (NY), Traver Gallery (Seattle), the Museum of American Glass (NJ), and more. She has received recognition through publications such as The Washington Post, Glass Quarterly Magazine, and New Glass Review, and her writing has appeared in various arts publications and exhibition catalogues. Julius has been awarded residencies at The Creative Glass Center of America and the Museum of Glass, and received support from the York Cultural Alliance, the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative, and Temple University’s research initiatives.

In all aspects of her work, Julius remains committed to cultivating connection—between material and maker, idea and experience, viewer and object. Her work insists on openness, vulnerability, and the possibility of transformation through creative practice.

Collaborative

Jessica Jane Julius and Erica Rosenfeld are artists, educators, and co-founders of The Burnt Asphalt Family—an experimental artist collective formed in 2007 to create immersive, community-driven performances and installations that blur the boundaries between art, craft, design, and culinary experience.

Their collaboration began during a residency at Wheaton Arts, where their first public demonstration unexpectedly became a foundational performance: roasting a full Thanksgiving turkey with hot glass tools in front of an audience. That singular moment sparked nearly two decades of hybrid work that draws from the languages of food, glass, shared ritual, and ephemeral sculpture. At its heart, their practice uses the kitchen and the hot shop as metaphors for the studio—communal spaces where identity, labor, and care intersect.

Over the last 18 years, Julius and Rosenfeld have been invited to perform and exhibit across the U.S. and internationally, including at institutions such as UrbanGlass, Berlin Glas, The Chrysler Museum of Art, The Corning Museum of Glass, The Bay Area Glass Institute, Pittsburgh Glass Center, Wheaton Arts, Penland School of Craft, and Pilchuck Glass School. In addition to exhibitions and performances, they’ve been commissioned to design participatory, edible installations for fundraisers, museums, and public gatherings, each performance culminating in a shared meal that dissolves the traditional barriers between audience and artwork.

Together, they have developed a rich repertoire of experimental hot glass cooking methods—grilling, steaming, roasting, and kinetic fire sculpture—creating performances that transform the hot shop into a kitchen and the meal into an ephemeral, sensorial archive. Their installations often feature sculptural food environments, layered with meaning and material, that invite participants to deconstruct and consume the artwork, leaving behind a physical trace of collective experience.

The Burnt Asphalt Family is co-facilitated by Julius and Rosenfeld and includes over thirty rotating members—artists, designers, chefs, and educators—who bring their own traditions, materials, and expertise into the evolving body of work.

Whether hosting performances for 150 people or leading workshops that culminate in campus-wide events, their collaborative practice consistently centers generosity, gathering, and the radical potential of shared labor. Their work asks: who sits at your table, and how do shared acts of making, eating, and witnessing help define community?