“Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke

Juliana Roth is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, and performer living in New York City.

A former Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow at The Center for Fiction and Miami Book Fair Fellowship Finalist in Fiction, her work as an interdisciplinary artist was supported by the innovative Creatives Rebuild New York program, a project of the Tides Center with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Juliana was a semifinalist for the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry at California State University - Fresno and named an honorable mention by Hanif Abdurraqib for the Button Poetry Contest. She holds a certificate in Advancing Compassion: Exploring Animal Rights in Multispecies Societies from Radboud University in The Netherlands. Her literary writing investigates what we owe to our world and the other-than-human lives around us.

While studying English Literature & Languages and environmental studies at the University of Michigan, Juliana received a Cowden Memorial Writing Fellowship and the Quinn Creative Writing Prize. A Publishing Fellow with the Los Angeles Review of Books at the University of Southern California, Juliana was twice nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology. Her essays, poetry, and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in BOMB, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Breakwater Review, Irish Pages, Yemassee, among other publications. She was selected as a VIDA Fellow with Sundress Academy for the Arts and shortlisted by Rob Doyle for the Red Line Book Festival’s TU Dublin Short Story Competition.

film

Juliana wrote/directed/produced the award-winning narrative web series, The University, which follows the bureaucratic failures of a college in the aftermath of a sexual assault and exposes the barriers for seeking healing and justice. She was nominated by the International Academy of Web Television for Best Drama Writing for the project. The series won Best Web/Pilot at the Los Angeles Film Awards and placed as a finalist for Best Pilot with the Vancouver Independent Film Festival, later touring nonprofits and college campuses to support survivors and perpetrators of sexual violence to create transformation. The project was selected for a screening with It’s On Us & End Rape on Campus to support students organizing across the country to reform campus policies. Educational screenings of the project are available through Films Media Group along with a free guidebook that students and organizers can use to create survivor-centered change on local campuses.

Screenplays by Juliana were selected for Script Summit, the Atlanta Film Festival, the Austin Revolution Film Festival, the Socially Relevant Film Festival, the Big Apple Film Festival, and advanced as productions in ScreenCraft’s Film Fund along with being featured on Girl Gaze and in Cinema Femme. She was selected as a Seconder Rounder for the Austin Film Festival Screenwriting Competition and advanced in the Sundance Episodic Lab for her pilot, Final Curtain Call. The script was developed with Stowe Story Labs as a Maven Screen Media Fellowship Finalist after which she directed a short film of the same name. Final Curtain Call premiered at Cinema Village with the New York Shorts International Film Festival followed by an Academy-qualifying theatrical run in Los Angeles with Lumiere Cinema at the Music Hall.

She often works as a consultant and screenwriter for independent films and loves to collaborate with vibrant storytellers across disciplines.

academic life

While earning her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Rutgers University - Camden, Juliana organized the Writers House Film Series and taught creative writing, environmental writing, and composition courses. She went on to teach at the City University of New York - John Jay College of Criminal Justice and New York University, where she was invited to present at the Decolonizing the Liberal Arts Curriculum Symposium at NYU London and received an Inclusive Teaching Certification from NYU’s Office of Global Inclusion. She is a contributor to Teaching Writing in the Global College Classroom: Practices, Paradigms, Possibilities, a forthcoming anthology from SUNY Press offering practical tools for multilingual classrooms.

As the former Chief Storyteller for the Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center, she founded Writing With Hopper, Myths & Legends, and a series of workshops on Jo Nivison Hopper’s legacy: More Than a Muse. She also co-founded and curated a community-based film series, Rockland in Motion, in her former role as Media Specialist with Rivertown Film Society. She’s worked for the Ecology Center, the Michigan Network for Children’s Environmental Health, the Center for the Education of Women+, The School of The New York Times, and the World Animal Awareness Society. She was an Ecotopian Library Resident on Governors Island for which she organized a community environmental poetry workshop. Her poems were read and displayed at Swale House with the exhibit Re-Imagining Conservation: From the Ground Up in partnership with Creature Conserve & the Urban Soils Institute and displayed at Equity Gallery as part of Melanie Vote’s The Washhouse exhibition.