Julie Beauvais is an opera director, transdisciplinary artist, and educator based in the mountains of southern Switzerland and northern India. Through her work, she explores the fundamental tenets of opera in its diverse expressions around the world: 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 Jacques Lecoq in Paris in 2000, Beauvais co-founded several companies in the United States, Switzerland, and Denmark. For ten years, she explored forms of 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 repertoire. In 2013, she created a platform for her experiments by founding Windhorse, a multicultural laboratory where she explores 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–Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, HEMU–Haute Ecole de Musique, Arthaus.Berlin International Training and Research Center, SMI–Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, and more. Julie 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 which she founded and co-directed from 2020 to 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 and performed, among others, 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 focus on Himalayan operas and their potential to create new narratives that reflect both local heritage and global paradigm shifts.