Julia Locascio is a theatre and opera director focused on collective creation and new forms. She works with writers and composers to make new work with big-hearted characters and a mischievous relationship to structure.

She has directed new and classic musicals, ensemble plays with hallucinatory design, outdoor spectacles and avant garde dinner theatre, including Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork's London Road, Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses, Sondheim's Follies and Merrily We Roll Along.

From 2011-2021 Julia was Artistic Director of The Waking Theatre, a small-scale touring theatre company based in New York. She has worked as an associate director and designer in London’s West End, with the RSC, the Old Vic, Punchdrunk, with Sting on his musical The Last Ship, and on the first US tour of War Horse.

Julia has also developed adaptations of The Tiger’s Bride by Angela Carter, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender and Vanya’s, a new jazz improv musical based on Uncle Vanya by A.C. Smith and Bella Barlow. Recently she worked with 59 Productions to develop the immersive performance elements across several floors of a major museum in the UAE.

She currently teaches acting and directing for the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Mountview Academy, ArtsEd and the Birkbeck MFA in Theatre Directing. Past teaching includes workshops for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the Young Vic, the Old Vic, the RSC, the Lyric Hammersmith, British Youth Opera, San Jose State University, and Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford.

2018 SDC Charles Abbott Musical Theatre Fellow. Awards and grants from Arts Council England, the Theatre Development Fund, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the National Foundation for Advancement of the Arts and the Drama League.

Proud member of Stage Directors UK. BFA NYU Tisch Drama, MFA Birkbeck Theatre Directing.