Portrait of Julia

JULIA HALTIGAN

Julia Haltigan grew up at the corner of Ludlow and Rivington Streets in a family of artists, musicians, cab drivers and quintessential New York characters, in a building immortalized in the panoramic photograph wrapping the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. It was the Lower East Side of the 1980s and ’90s, when music poured from cellar rehearsal spaces, Max Fish and Luna Lounge were up the block, and the lines between neighborhood life, nightlife and art were wonderfully blurred. Her childhood took her from downtown artists’ lofts and taxi garages to parties atop the Chelsea Hotel, where Madonna’s seamstress once made her miniature party dresses to fit in with the scene.

By fifteen, Haltigan was writing songs and carrying them into the strange creative ecosystem she'd grown up watching. She performed at the performance-art open mics of Collective Unconscious across the street from her apartment and became a regular at Lach’s legendary Anti-Folk Hootenanny at SideWalk Cafe, part of the downtown scene that also gave early stages to artists like the Moldy Peaches and Regina Spektor. One night, Chris Barron of the Spin Doctors handed teenage Julia his card and told her she was a great songwriter. She kept going.

After studying music and visual art at Hampshire College, Haltigan returned to New York and formed Julia Haltigan & the Hooligans with a college friend. They started playing every Tuesday night at the 11th Street Bar, a beloved venue of artists like Ryan Adams and Justin Townes Earle, turning what began as a neighborhood residency into a packed weekly institution that lasted for years. Her father, who had first encouraged her to write songs, even joined the band at times. Around the same period she would perform with her friend Jack Antonoff’s band Steel Train. Antonoff produced her first songs at Prairie Sun Studios in California, the same place her idol Tom Waits had recorded Bone Machine and Mule Variations.

Haltigan went on to release six solo albums and tour extensively throughout the United States, UK and Ireland, developing a musical identity that moved freely between smoky rock and roll, vintage Americana and spare electronic experimentation. She has performed at the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Joe’s Pub, BAM, Bowery Ballroom and Le Poisson Rouge; appeared on Late Show with David Letterman singing for Justin Townes Earle and on The Wendy Williams Show with Big Freedia; and formed a recording project with Scarlett Johansson, Kendra Morris and Holly Miranda, produced by Dave Sitek called Sugar For Sugar. Her music has been featured in film and television, and her work has been covered by The New York Times, Interview, Billboard and Glamour.

Throughout Haltigan’s career, collaboration has repeatedly expanded the boundaries of what she imagined herself doing. About a year after the hit immersive Punchdrunk show Sleep No More opened in New York, Julia sang with a friend’s band at the McKittrick Hotel’s music venue after the show. A member of the Sleep No More production team heard her sing and asked if she would like to play the role of chanteuse in the main show. She quickly built her jazz repertoire and developed her character, Vivian Fairchild, a raw and glamorous 1930s-inspired chanteuse whom she would inhabit at the McKittrick for the remainder of the show’s decade-long run of sold-out performances.

Performing in character night after night taught her to improvise with strangers, trust the unknown and understand an audience as part of the performance itself. More importantly, the massive ensemble behind Sleep No More changed her understanding of what making something could be. Performers of all kinds and a massive production team worked together to create an illusion that no individual could achieve alone. No one starred in the show. The world they created together was the star.

That experience opened Haltigan’s creative life outward.

Another unexpected invitation brought her to film. Director Alonso Ruizpalacios had first encountered Haltigan years earlier while visiting her 11th Street Bar residency. When developing his film La Cocina, Alonso reached out with the screenplay and told her he had named its central character, Julia, partly for her; the character’s raw New York attitude had been inspired by the performer he remembered from those nights downtown. Before casting Haltigan, Ruizpalacios asked for her perspective on the script, drawing on her knowledge of New York to refine locations, language and details of the film’s world. He then asked her to play Trisha, the head waitress and boss to Rooney Mara’s character, giving Julia her first glimpse at the magic of film production.

Filmed over several months on a soundstage in Mexico City, La Cocina immersed Haltigan in another large creative ensemble. Through improvisation, theater exercises and work with actors from around the world, she discovered a new way of performing and an immediate love for the collaborative language of filmmaking. The experience transformed acting from something she had been reluctant to attempt into a direction she is continuing to explore and learn from.

Meanwhile, other forms had begun finding their way in.

A habit of making strange little horror movies on her phone starring people from her performer community led Julia to team up with fellow musician Kendra Morris. Together, they created Dead Phone 13 Productions, an excuse to cast people they knew in homemade films and follow whatever ridiculous ideas amused them. And their ideas were very amusing. When Morris later asked Haltigan to help make a stop-motion music video for Chuck Prophet, play became another creative language. Haltigan began making videos for herself and other musicians, experimenting with collage, clay, stop motion and handmade felted creatures.

Her longstanding fascination with the relationship between music and film led naturally to music supervision. Haltigan had always been captivated by the mysterious way music and image transform one another, and by how a song discovered through a film can become inseparable from the world in which you first heard it. Filmmaker Cathryne Czubek invited Julia to supervise her documentary Once Upon a Time in Uganda, which went on to win several awards. For the project, Julia teamed up with Alexandra Allen, whom she had met through her publishing company, ModernWorks. The two have since gone on to music supervise five films together.

Today, many of the threads in Haltigan’s creative life converge in her latest music project Moon Radio, a collaboration with multi-instrumentalist and composer Yusuke Yamamoto. The two first crossed paths through Sleep No More, but years later discovered an unusually intuitive musical chemistry of their own. Where Haltigan’s solo work had often been driven by a restless curiosity that pulled her in many directions, Moon Radio established a world with such clear parameters that those boundaries became liberating. What began as a musical collaboration has grown into an imaginative universe encompassing performance, character, storytelling, animation, projection, humor and audience interaction. Moon Radio has expanded into theatrical presentations including a variety show featured at Joe’s Pub and immersive performances incorporating sound, image and scent. Rather than treating those elements as separate disciplines, Haltigan uses them as different tools for creating the same thing: an experience capable of transporting an audience and connecting the people inside it.

In some ways, Haltigan has spent her life moving through worlds: the unruly downtown New York of her childhood, bands and recording studios, iconic hotels and imaginary ones, film sets, handmade animations and stages filled with collaborators. Along the way she has become a songwriter, performer, actor, filmmaker, music supervisor and creator, but the titles are less significant than the connective thread between them: curiosity, play, collaboration and a strong sense of place.

She remains fascinated by what happens when music, image, character, atmosphere and people come together to make an imagined world feel real, and by that peculiar moment when an audience decides to play along. For a little while, everyone agrees that the imaginary thing is real.