Julie Beauvais
Opera director, Transdisciplinary Artist, Educator
Based in the mountains of southern Switzerland and northern India, Julie Beauvais explores the fundamental tenets of opera across global traditions: the embodiment of cosmoperceptions, vibrations traveling through vastness, and ever-changing fields of entanglements. Her creations have been presented internationally since 2001.
After graduating from the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris in 2000, Beauvais co-founded several companies in the United States, Switzerland, and Denmark. For the next decade, she explored Epic Theatre in diverse political contexts, leading to long-term collaborations with Brazilian, Mongolian, and Nicaraguan companies. In 2006, she began staging operas, soon focusing on contemporary and Majority World repertoires. In 2013, she created a platform for her experiments by founding Windhorse, a multicultural laboratory dedicated to exploring how contemporary opera can contribute to sustainable development and global cooperation.
Invited to share her research and passionate about the continuity of practices and the mutation of processes, she regularly collaborates with institutions including ZHdK–Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Hochschule für Musik FHNW in Basel, Hochschule Luzern–Musik, EPFL–École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the HEMU–Haute École de Musique, Arthaus.Berlin International Training and Research Center, and the SMI–Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, among others. She also leads workshops and masterclasses internationally.
Selected recent works include The Witness (since 2018), a translocal opera practice weaving Earth’s changing messages with the voices of indigenous wisdom holders; Sonic Matter, an experimental music platform and festival based in Zurich (founded and co-directed 2020–2022); and ALTER– (2021-2024), a high-altitude residency program fostering collaboration among artists, researchers, and local inhabitants in response to environmental crises. Recently, she directed ORLANDO, a New Paradigm Opera co-produced by La Bâtie–Festival de Genève. This production has toured extensively, appearing at the FIBA–Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires, the Festival de Santiago a Mil, the Mostra Internacional de Teatro de São Paulo, the O. Festival in Rotterdam, the Manifesta13 European biennial in Marseille, and throughout India.
Julie's current collaborative field research focuses on Himalayan operas and their potential to create new narratives that reflect both local heritage and global paradigm shifts.
