Lives and works in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
Julia Salinger's varied art career began as an art historian. Her mentor, Irving Sandler, was the preeminent art scholar who wrote ' The Triumph of American Painting.' She continued her studies at Columbia University and worked for Ronald Feldman Fine Arts as a researcher for five Andy Warhol print portfolios. During this period, she was accepted into the prestigious curatorial program at the Hirschorn Museum in Washington, DC. She has also worked at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design, the Guggenheim, The Neuberger Museum and the Whitney.
Her journey took her into the musical side of the arts, where she managed performers for over seventeen years. She worked with such diverse talents as Laurie Anderson, Bobby McFerrin, Diane Reeves and Diana Krall. After a few life changing experiences, she decided it was time to nourish her own creative spirit. In 1999 she started to create her own work. Since 2000, she has shown in numerous group shows and is represented in collections in the US, Europe and Asia.
My writing and visual work is interrelated. I know that at times I want to keep the writing separate from the image but they can’t help but merge. I think my free associative nature finds its way into both places. In terms of identification…many of my lines are extremely calligraphic. When I am drawing, I feel as if I am writing in space. I love the flow of penmanship, the grace of the line and the electricity of ink to paper. A line speaks in many voices, in sounds, in color and rhythms. Words, like forms, color or line, also has its own language of meaning, nuance, duality and feeling. Each line has its own individual emotional resonance be it of passion, fear, exhilaration, innocence and anger. I like to play with the emotional content of the two in my visual work. It is like a magic mirror, a looking glass…prisms, distortions of something else appear. It is my own gestural patterning..
I work in a very direct and immediate manner. The accidents which occur make the work real and human. The element of surprise emerges from the layers. I 
soak, beat, scrape, carve, rip and puncture the paper. The saturation of information imbues the piece with a sense of age and memory.
Part of my process is daydreaming or nightdreaming...feeling like a channel or instrument by which all the sounds, sights and smells of the day are incorporated. My days are like miniature films--a breakdown and composite of life's fragments. This information sparks new patterns, colors, images and helps to describe the essence of a place...it's atmosphere and mystery. Out of this, an idea will inspire a stream of conciousness. These variations or riffs develop into drawings, writings, marks and remnants of the original thought. The final energized and agitated surface creates a tension between beauty and chaos. It is within the two, that I reveal those restful places...that space of stillness in which we are able to reflect and discover. That place in my work explores for me what it means to be human. The balance between the tragic and the comic in life.