Julia Rhoads

As choreographer and Artistic Director of dance-theater company Lucky Plush Productions, Julia Rhoads has been described as “Chicago’s resident surrealist” by the Chicago Sun Times, and “adept at both provocative and humorous material” by PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.

A former company member of the San Francisco Ballet, and performer and artistic associate of XSIGHT! Performance Group, Rhoads’s distinct integration of dance with theater and visual design has brought Lucky Plush to a wide range of venues, from warehouse peep shows to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Lucky Plush has created site-specific works for locations such as the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park, The Great Hall at Chicago’s Union Station, Sleeping Bear Dune in Glen Arbor Michigan, and the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival in Fairbanks, Alaska. The company was listed among the top 10 memories in dance for 2005 and 2007 by the Chicago Sun Times, and was featured on the cover of Time Out Chicago for the article “5 Reasons to Love Dance in Chicago.”

Independently, Rhoads has received a Cliff Dwellers Foundation Award for Choreography, two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships for Choreography, a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award, and was recently named a chorographic fellow for the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography in 2008. She earned a BA in History from Northwestern University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute Chicago, and is currently a part-time faculty member in the theater department at Columbia College Chicago.