Julie Ann Otis

American Therapy

Produced, Directed, and Edited: Monica Cohen, Boom House Productions

Additional Videography: Max Esposito

Music: Monica Cohen and Renato Milone

Armed with typewriters, steno pads, paint brushes, and compassionate listening, we created a 200 square-foot, evolving mural reflecting your American experience. All you had to do was speak your mind and tell us the one thing you wished the entire country could hear.

Julie Ann Otis is a civic engagement artist and consultant committed to an experience of ease for all. She teaches practices for compassionate communication through her executive coaching and interactive art. Her installation “American Therapy” catalyzed public compassion by translating everyday stories of people living in the U.S. into a 200 square-foot mural of poetry and portraiture. These and other civic engagement art installations have garnered her national and local press as an experimental artist working at the intersection of peacebuilding and public art. Other works include interactive, typewriter-based public poetry, burlesque spoken word poetry performed in aerial rope and harness, photopoetry exhibits, and multimedia poetry installations with improvisational music and liquid projection art.

She has performed at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Boston City Hall, Harvard University, La Guagua Festival in Massachusetts, and the Festival Internacional de Poesía Los Confines in Honduras. Her upcoming interactive installation, “Live Nude Girls,” explores what it is like for women to live in their unique bodies in a culture strung between extreme self-promotion and fourth generation feminism, using body paint to write poetry backwards on participants’ bodies. Awards include Live Arts Boston, Hemera, Barre Center for Buddhist Studies’ Dharma Artist Cohort, Artistic Fellow of Interdisciplinary Arts (Somerville, MA), Opus Affair Artist of the Year. Residencies: Art Farm (Marquette, NE), Noepe Center (Martha’s Vineyard, MA). Julie Ann has published two poetry collections, Elastic Communion and Sermons of the Real.

More on Julie Ann Otis’ work can be found on our Links page.