About

Julie Burelle (she/her/elle) is an associate professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre + Dance at UC San Diego. Originally from Quebec, Canada, she has studied and taught theatre on both coasts of Canada and the United States. Her research is invested in a decolonizing project and engages with the fields of Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, and Indigenous studies among others. Her first book, Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec (Northwestern UP 2019), focuses on how questions of Indigenous sovereignty, cultural identity, and nationhood are negotiated through performances in Quebec, a province with significant national aspirations. This work has received multiple awards, including the American Theatre and Drama Society's John W. Frick Book Award and the Canadian Association for Theatre Research's Ann Saddlemyer Book Award, and was short-listed for the Outstanding Book Award by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She is also a co-author of Xajoj Tun. Le Rabinal Achi d'Ondinnok. Réclections, entretiens, analyses (PUL 2021), which received two special mentions by the Prix Jean-Cléo Godin committee of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research. Her research has been published in various academic journals and edited volumes. As a practitioner, Julie works in collaborative settings and has served as a dramaturg for multiple theatre companies and projects. She was awarded the 2017 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Distinguished Teaching Award at UCSD and the 2018 Hellman Fellowship to pursue her research on Indigenous theatre and dance in Québec, Canada.

Research topics

• Art
• Humanities
• Business
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• CHAPITRE 4 Prendre le thé ensemble à Muliats (Montréal) La ville comme lieu de dialogue dans le théâtre de Menuentakuan

  Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal eBooks · 2025-03-28 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Antikoni in a Settler Classroom on Kumeyaay Land: Storytelling “in the Meantime” to Imagine “Beyond” It

  Performance Matters · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article documents the process that led two groups of students enrolled in a course at UC San Diego to enter into a deeper and more reciprocal embodied relationship with the play Antikoni (a Nez Perce adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone), its author Beth Piatote, and with UC San Diego’s fraught history related to the repatriation of Kumeyaay ancestors. Building on Theresa Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang’s urgent invitation to think “beyond land acknowledgement” and to invest time and energy in creating a world beyond settler colonialism, this article examines how being entrusted with a story—Antikoni in this case—can serve to activate settler accountability and, potentially, usher in the relational shift imagined by Stewart-Ambo and Yang. This article documents how the students chose to reciprocate the gift that is Antikoni in tangible ways in the form of two staged readings and offers a reflection on how this experience can extend beyond the classroom and lead to lasting transformative work among larger campus communities.

  PublisherDOI

• All That Moves Us: The Semantic Density of Clothing and Objects in <i>El Buen Vestir-Tlakentli’s</i> Choreographies of Indigenous Movements

  Theatre Research in Canada · 2024-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article explores El Buen Vestir-Tlakentli 2 (2017 and 2019) and argues that the two iterations of this dance-theatre piece are powerful explorations—through dance and the artists’ sensate relation to objects—of the moving journey that led artists Leticia Vera and Carlos Rivera Martínez from Mexico to Canada and from a sense of estrangement from their Indigeneity to an encounter with their ancestors’ complex and resistant negotiations with the oppressive forces ushered in by settler colonialism in Mexico. Shedding and layering clothes and leveraging the knowledges they encode, the artists remind us of all that moves us in the world. Through inhabiting clothes saturated with meaning, the dancers embody their ancestors throughout the performance, returning to them to better understand the past, its violence, and its joy and imagine a future remapped through decolonial geographies. This future, the author contends in conversation with the artists’ own words, takes the form of a hopeful reconfiguration of the symbolic space of Aztlán. Critical of its problematic past entanglement with race yet mobilizing its transformative power, the artists create a space where Indigeneity is no longer relegated to the past, where kinship is articulated on radically different terms, and where it might be possible to shed the layers of settler-colonial violence—gendered violence in particular–that continue to impact the everyday life of Indigenous women and girls.

  PublisherDOI

• I Will Answer by the Mouth of (Your) Can(n)on(s)! Indigenous Theatre’s Riposte to Quebec’s Literary Canon

  Studies in Canadian Literature · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  I Will Answer by the Mouth of (Your) Can(n)on(s)! Indigenous Theatre’s Riposte to Quebec’s Literary Canon. Un article de la revue Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (Special Issue: (Re)Reading Race and Colonialism in the Québécois Canon) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

  PublisherDOI

• I Will Answer by the Mouth of (Your) Can(n)on(s)! Indigenous Theatre’s Riposte to Quebec’s Literary Canon

  Érudit (Université de Montréal) · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Ktahkomiq : la langue comme territoire en soi(t)

  Percées Explorations en arts vivants · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Cet article traite du spectacle Ktahkomiq (« Territoire ») créé en 2017 par Dave Jenniss et Ivanie Aubin-Malo avec le soutien dramaturgique de Catherine Joncas. Je me penche sur le protocole de création qu’ont développé les artistes afin d’explorer, en répétition et sur scène, un conflit de longue date divisant leur communauté sans chercher à en supprimer les aspects irréconciliables. J’examine les moments de refus et de rapprochement qui donnent forme au spectacle et le rôle qu’a finalement joué la langue wolastoqey comme territoire commun pour les artistes.

  PublisherDOI

• A Conversation With Julie-Christina Picher, Atikamekw Set Designer

  Percées Explorations en arts vivants · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A Conversation With Julie-Christina Picher, Atikamekw Set Designer. Un article de la revue Percées (Théâtres et performances des Premiers Peuples : protocoles d’engagement) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

  PublisherDOI

• Lacassagne, Aurélie. Mémoires éclatées, mémoires conciliées. Essai sur Le Wild West Show de Gabriel Dumont. Sudbury, Prise de parole, 2021, 220 p.

  Revue d histoire de l Amérique française · 2023-10-25

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Lacassagne, Aurélie. Mémoires éclatées, mémoires conciliées. Essai sur Le Wild West Show de Gabriel Dumont. Sudbury, Prise de parole, 2021, 220 p.. Un article de la revue Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française (Les émotions dans l’histoire) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

  PublisherDOI

• Courage, Capacity, Earth-Diving: Riting Safe(r) Spaces Down in the “Muck”

  Percées Explorations en arts vivants · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Courage, Capacity, Earth-Diving: Riting Safe(r) Spaces Down in the “Muck”. Un article de la revue Percées (Théâtres et performances des Premiers Peuples : protocoles d’engagement) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

  PublisherDOI

• Sauter à pieds joints dans la « vase » : approches courageuses pour l’aménagement d’espaces de création (plus) sécuritaires

  Percées Explorations en arts vivants · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Mathematics
  • Art

  Sauter à pieds joints dans la « vase » : approches courageuses pour l’aménagement d’espaces de création (plus) sécuritaires. Un article de la revue Percées (Théâtres et performances des Premiers Peuples : protocoles d’engagement) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jill Carter

  3 shared

• Yves Sioui Durand

  2 shared

• Jean-François Côté

  2 shared

• Catherine Joncas

  2 shared

• Beth Piatote

  University of California, Berkeley

  2 shared

• Ken Wilson

  University of Regina

  1 shared

• Virginie Magnat

  1 shared

• Marco Collin

  1 shared

Labs

• Performance Studies FacultyPI

Awards & honors

• John W. Frick Book Award (2019)
• Canadian Association for Theatre Research's Ann Saddlemyer B…
• short-listed by the Association for Theatre in Higher Educat…
• Prix Jean-Cléo Godin committee of the Canadian Association f…
• 2017 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Distinguished Teaching…