Julia Stemper

Grants and Communications Manager

Julia Stemper (she/her) is a Chicago-based theater practitioner, and is dedicated to using theater as a tool to build community, expand ideas, and invite positive change to the world. Her work ranges from performing devised Shakespeare to running interactive story hours to teaching movement based theater-making, and everything in-between.

Julia has known Filament Theatre as an audience member, a performer, a teaching artist, and now as the grants and communications manager as well. She brings grantwriting experience from working at myriad nonprofits throughout her career, and communications experience from putting her foot in her mouth in junior high a lot! Julia founded, and remains the Artistic Director, for Stone Soup Shakespeare, a Midwest touring Shakespeare company, where she also writes grants, produces tours, and oversees all educational programming. Additionally she teaches yoga for Wildlight Yoga in Portage Park (just upstairs from Filament), where she literally teaches people how to put their feet in their mouths (ok, by their mouths).

Select Chicago performance credits include most recently The Tragedy of Macbeth (Stone Soup Shakespeare), When You Awake You Will Remember Everything, and I Build Giants (The Plagiarists), Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed (Lifeline), Pericles (Shakespeare Project of Chicago), Romeo and Juliet (First Folio), and Moon Rhymes (Filament as part of The Gift’s TEN).

Julia received an MA in Classical and Contemporary Acting, ranked in the QS ‘World Top 5’ for performing arts education.  She holds a BA from Macalester College in St. Paul. In between degrees, Julia lived in Washington, DC where she worked for the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Museum of American History and myriad theater companies around the capitol.  Julia credits most of who she is to her family, a little of her imagination to nursery school and a smidge of her positivity to Mary Tyler Moore – cause who isn’t inspired by berets being tossed in the air. Julia also boasts a love of baking pies, belting jazz tunes, and cheering on college basketball and NHL hockey.