Julie Orser

Julie Orser (born 1974) is an American contemporary visual artist based in Los Angeles. Orser merges art and cinema in video, animation, photography and installation works that examine mainstream representations of gender, the female psyche, place and time. Her practice engages with the mechanics and history of American cinema in order to deconstruct genre conventions, narrative structures and character archetypes from a feminist perspective. She isolates specific scenes, gestures and moods and amplifies mise-en-scène (setting, lighting or costume), creating recontextualizations that reveal stereotypes and often unnoticed aspects of filmmaking. In an Artforum review, Andrew Berardini wrote that Orser's work constructed "a female image that falls somewhere between icon and cliché … deftly re-creat[ing] the lurid dramas of cinematic pulp to study them as sites of fictional femininity."

Orser has screened or exhibited work at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, New Britain Museum of American Art, Norton Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, among others. Her art belongs to the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is a professor in the Creative Photography & Experimental Media program at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF).