For this week’s Plant Stories podcast, we interview multi-disciplinary artist Julia O. Bianco. Julia was a Deep Ecology Artist Fellow at the United Plant Savers (UpS) Sanctuary, one of our favorite non-profit organizations focused on protecting native medicinal plants, fungi, and their ecosystems. Hear how an online foraging class, the artist in residency program at the UpS Sanctuary, and the plants Julia encountered in the Appalachian foothills, all helped to shape the course of her life and her creative inspiration. Julia closes the show by reading three of her nature-inspired poems.

Julia Orquera Bianco was born in Argentina and lived in Mexico before moving to the United States. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Drawing and Painting from Universidad del Museo Social Argentino (Buenos Aires, Argentina) in 2012. In 2018 she graduated from the MFA program at Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. In 2020, Bianco earned a Certificate on Sustainability from University of California, Los Angeles.

Bianco works through interrogating constructs resulting from Modern Western Culture, collective memory, and the experience of migration and gender. This allows her to speak about an identity constantly being renegotiated and in motion, in deep relation and conversation with the environment. Her explorations use her family legacy of labor as a strategy to connect with worlds that she is foreign to, experiencing them while remembering. She currently teaches at University of Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work has been showcased in Argentina, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, and the United States.

Visit Julia’s website. View Julia’s drawings. Watch Julia’s performance pieces.

Learn more about the Deep Ecology Artists Fellowship.

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