Julianne Becker

Julianne Becker is a multidisciplinary artist, storyteller, and community builder with a background in fine arts, experimental film, and cultural production. Born in Minneapolis, USA, she studied fine arts in St. Louis and New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute, focusing on video, installation, and performance. Her path has taken her from San Francisco’s independent art scene to documentary film-making and environmental activism in Vietnam, and later to Berlin and rural Brandenburg.

Throughout her work, she explores how art, storytelling, and shared experiences can connect people and transform places. As co-founder of Coconat, a creative retreat and social enterprise in the Hoher Fläming region, she has spent years building spaces for collaboration, cultural exchange, and new perspectives on rural life.

Returning to regular artistic practice in 2021, Julianne embraces the act of making itself. Her prolific, intuitive approach to painting allows her to enter a space where time dissolves. Through details, gestures, and mark-making, stories emerge, sometimes finding their continuation in written texts.

During her residency at 150 m d’altitude, she will explore the banana as an everyday object carrying extraordinary histories of cultivation, colonialism, labor, mythology, and cultural exchange. She plans to create small-scale works, primarily watercolor on paper, while experimenting with locally discovered materials, alternative surfaces, homemade inks, and potentially scent as a carrier of memory. These explorations will contribute to an exhibition in her new home in eastern Germany with the Kunstverein Hoher Fläming.

Alongside her visual practice, she will develop at least one narrative arc for her first novel, which she intends to begin writing in 2027. Imagining a near future where humanity has found ways of living peacefully together, her writing continues her interest in possibility, transformation, purpose, and our shared stories and existence.