Zara Julius is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Johannesburg. She works primarily with sound and multimedia installation, print and social practice; often collaborating with musicians, cultural workers and educators. Her practice is informed by her working methodology of “rapture”; asking how we might take seriously Black cultural innovation, fugitivity and performativity as sites of possibility in contexts of enduring extractivist logics. Her work involves the collection, selection, and creation of (contested) archives — real, imagined and embodied — through extensive research. She is especially engaged in thinking through the archive, the death-life matrix, and the internal workings of the Black sonic, and how they may help us reconstitute Time, memory, affect, and History in the face of various unfreedoms and landlessness. Zara has recently released an art book project, A Funeral For…, and is currently in the process of developing her first work for stage of the same title.

Zara holds a BAHons in social anthropology from the University of Cape Town (2014) and a MAFA in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand (2021).  Her training also includes a Documentary Film residency intensive with Enrique Colina at Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television, Cuba (2015), and the Women Opera Makers workshop with opera and theatre director Katie Mitchell at Académie du Festival d’Aix, France (2025).