Julia Wojciechowska

Julia Wojciechowska is a graduate student in the MA Performance Studies program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her research lies at the intersection of performance, labor, and material culture, with particular attention to the politics of visibility and the poetics of craft. Drawing from a professional background in costume production and international stage work, she explores how embodied labor and textile practices inform performative environments and backstage economies. Her current work employs ethnographic methods and cultural analysis to examine the material conditions of performance-making.

Project Title: Life and Death of Textiles: On The Traces of Invisible Labor in Theatrical Costumes and the Objects’ of Performative Orientation

Project Description: This project investigates theatrical costume as a site of relational labor and performative agency. Drawing on autoethnographic experience and material analysis, the research foregrounds backstage practices—ironing, mending, laundering—as embodied forms of care and choreography. Engaging theories of material trace, object relationality, and labor visibility, the paper asks how garments hold and erase bodily histories, and how maintenance labor—often feminized, marginalized, and rendered invisible—might be read as an authorship in its own right. The project also inquires into galleries' display practices in showcasing textile objects, contrasting the “death” of garments behind glass with the “liveness” of costumed labor. It ultimately proposes that theatrical costumes not only dress bodies but also perform their own histories of exhaustion, repair, and intimacy.

Project Inspiration: Years of washing peoples' underwear for money.

Academic Interests: Relational Ontology, Material Culture, Cultural Analysis, Labor, Craft and Repair Practices, Curatorial Practice, Traces of Objects, Visual Anthropology, Performance Critique