“Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
photo by Roque Nonini
Juliana Roth is a writer, filmmaker, and performer.
Born and raised in Nyack, New York, she lives in New York City where she teaches writing at New York University and the City University of New York - John Jay College of Criminal Justice. A 2022-23 Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow at The Center for Fiction, her work as an artist is supported by the innovative Creatives Rebuild New York program, a project of Tides Center with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
While studying English Literature & Languages and environmental studies at the University of Michigan, Juliana received a Cowden Memorial Writing Fellowship and the Quinn Creative Writing Prize. A Publishing Fellow with the Los Angeles Review of Books at the University of Southern California, Juliana was twice nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology. Her essays, poetry, and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Entropy, The Breakwater Review, Irish Pages, The Atticus Review, Reckoning, The Establishment, Yemassee, among other publications. She was selected as a VIDA Fellow with Sundress Publications for her fiction and shortlisted by Rob Doyle for the Red Line Book Festival’s TU Dublin Short Story Competition.
Juliana wrote/directed/produced the award-winning narrative web series, The University, which follows the bureaucratic failures of a university in the aftermath of a sexual assault on campus and exposes the barriers for seeking healing and justice. She was nominated by the International Academy of Web Television for Best Drama Writing for the project. The series won Best Web/Pilot at the Los Angeles Film Awards and placed as a finalist for Best Pilot with the Vancouver Independent Film Festival, later touring film festivals, nonprofits, and college campuses. The project was selected for a screening with It’s On Us to support students organizing across the country to reform campus policies. Educational screenings of the project are available through Films Media Group along with a free guidebook that students and organizers can use to create restorative, survivor-centered change on local campuses.
In 2018, Juliana earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Rutgers University - Camden where she organized the Writers House Film Series and taught creative writing, environmental writing, and composition courses. As the former Chief Storyteller for the Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center, she founded Writing With Hopper, Myths & Legends, and a series of workshops on Jo Nivison Hopper’s legacy: More Than a Muse. She also co-founded and curated a community-based film series, Rockland in Motion, in her former role as Media Specialist with Rivertown Film Society. She’s worked for the Ecology Center, the Center for The Education of Women, The School of The New York Times, and the World Animal Awareness Society.
Screenplays by Juliana were selected for Script Summit, the Atlanta Film Festival, the Austin Revolution Film Festival, the Socially Relevant Film Festival, the Lady Filmmakers’s Festival, and advanced as productions in ScreenCraft’s Film Fund along with being featured on Girl Gaze and in Cinema Femme. She was selected as a Seconder Rounder for the Austin Film Festival Screenwriting Competition and advanced in the Sundance Episodic Lab for her pilot, Final Curtain Call. The script was developed with Stowe Story Labs as a Maven Screen Media Fellowship Finalist after which she directed a short film of the same name, which premiered at Cinema Village with the New York Shorts International Film Festival.