Julia Hechtman is a visual artist who lives and works in Boston, USA. The natural world features prominently in her works, which has allowed her to travel extensively, and to contemplate the familiar in new ways. Her favorite place to go is Iceland.

This past winter, Hechtman was a Fulbright Scholar in Iceland, where she began to work on Not Once, a series of short videos. The project began with the recording of personal stories by local Icelanders, about specific locations or a sense of place. The resulting stories vary greatly, from incredibly intimate and vulnerable, to more commonplace and closer akin to tourist experiences. Hechtman then visited the locations in order to record video footage on site. When the audio and video are coupled together, a new sense of personal narrative is created, transforming one experience into another, and ultimately creating a third: the viewer’s experience.

(born 1969) Julia Hechtman received her MFA in Photography, Film, and Video from University of Illinois at Chicago, and her BFA in Photography from Syracuse University. Since then, she has shown her work nationally and internationally that include recent exhibitions in Chicago at devening projects and in Boston at LaMontagne Gallery. Her videos are part of the Video Data Bank’s collection in Chicago, Illinois and have been screened recently in London’s 52nd Film Festival, at City Art Rooms in Auckland, New Zealand, and at The Artist Foundation in Boston. Her work is also in the collections of the Worcester Art Museum and Northeastern University as well as many private collections. She has been reviewed in the Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune and on artforum.com among other publications. She has been an artist-in-residence at Oxbow in Saugatuck, Michigan, at Sydney Olympic Park in Sydney, Australia and most recently at Nes Artist Residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland. Julia Hechtman lives and works in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.