Justine Wolf Williams (she, they) is a performance & film maker, actor, screenwriter, and creative producer who seeks to evoke (and invoke) a sense of vulnerable presence, playfulness, pathos and poetic possibility in and through her work. This work has taken the shape of performance, film, cabaret and variety, installation, live cinema, augmented reality, a queer jamboree, as well as workshops, collectives, zines, screenplays, song cycles, and other surprising new forms (even to her).
She created a surrealist cinema house in the back of a box truck (Night Market), sang original music atop a boomlift for a mechanical ballet (Empire Drive-In, Queens Museum), performed in contemporary re-imaginings of Moliere farces (Yale Repertory Theater/Berkeley Rep), and has presented clown and commedia shows (from the backrooms of Mexican restaurants to NYC's most respected stages.)
She created a surrealist cinema house in the back of a box truck (Night Market), sang original music atop a boomlift for a mechanical ballet (Empire Drive-In, Queens Museum), performed in contemporary re-imaginings of Moliere farces (Yale Repertory Theater/Berkeley Rep), and has presented clown and commedia shows (from the backrooms of Mexican restaurants to NYC's most respected stages.)
"Who played the babysitter?"
Amazing. Huge fan of her work”.
- Ryan Gosling
A collaborator, at heart, Justine thrives in the mess and magic of “groupness", and she's driven by a deep belief in the power of social imagination to open narratives and dream worlds forward. She seeks out and seeks to create highly collaborative, relational, playful encounters through art, and she brings her tools for creative collaboration to diverse contexts and communities.
Collaborations include 8 years of creative partnership with artist, Eva Peskin, on queer friendship and collaborative world-making, and an ongoing project with artist/death doula, Kate Muehlmann, that invites the public to engage creatively with questions around death and dying. Justine has collaborated with female “folk comedy” filmmakers – Shaina Feinberg (Blunderpuss) and Shannon Plumb (Towheads), and her cinematic work as a performer/writer/director/producer has screened at Maryland Film Festival, Woodstock Film Festival, New Directors|New Films, Rotterdam Film Festival, and more.
Justine's work has been supported by The Public Theater, Ars Nova, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Women in Film and Television, Queer|Art, Orchard Project, Lighthouse Film Festival and New Georges, among others. She has been on faculty at the Yale School of Drama since 2013, where she teaches acting as play, creative process, and collaborative practice, and she holds an MFA from Brooklyn College’s Performance and Interactive Media Arts program.
Justine lives between Paris and Brooklyn with her partner and toddler.
