Julia Locascio is a director, costume designer, and sensory artist. Her recent directing work includes the first production of Polly Pen’s musical The Flitch, Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, Charles Mee’s Gone, and her original works What Might’ve Been Lost and You Are Made of Stars.

These original pieces are the first in her exploration of sensory theatre: experiences that employ smell, flavor and physical sensation as well as sight and sound. Food, scent and touch become emotional communicators as vital as lights, media, sound, set and costumes. Julia hopes to use this work to bring an expanded and specified living awareness to its participants: to highlight life's sensations so as to make them active, immediate and immersed in the present.

Julia has organized and managed costume design, construction and wardrobe at the Williamstown Theatre Festival; studied Viewpoints, Suzuki and Composition with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company; strengthened audience engagement and dialogue in the marketing and development departments at Chicago's Redmoon Theater; and, in 2009, produced, curated, managed and led an art festival at the Red Cloud Opera House and Sweetwater Gallery in Red Cloud, Nebraska.

Most recently, she assisted the innovative British theatre company Punchdrunk with the building and management of their immersive installation/production, Sleep No More, in Manhattan. Julia has a BFA in Directing, Costume Design and Art History with honors from New York University.

She would love to create with you, too. Write her a letter at julia.locascio@gmail.com.

Current Project

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On Rose's ninth birthday , her mother presents her with a lemon cake shellacked with thick chocolate buttercream icing. Biting into her first piece, she discovers that she has an unwelcome super power: she can taste the feelings  of the person who prepared her food. Immersed in the delicate union of sour and sweet, sunshine and cocoa, she tastes a black hole of sadness the color of the bags under her mother's eyes.  Her ability continues, meal after meal, and Rose is catapulted into a gastronomical journey as she unwillingly peeks into the inner life of her family and discovers secrets long since buried.         

Lemon Cake will be crafted as sensory theatre , which is theatre that you can smell (think arty smell-o-vision), touch and taste as well as see and hear.  This theatrical, multimedia and culinary event is a reinvention of Aimee Bender 's newest novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake .