Grammy-winning American classical singer Julia Bullock “communicates intense, authentic feeling, as if she were singing right from her soul” (Opera News). Combining versatile artistry with a probing intellect and commanding stage presence, she has headlined productions and concerts at preeminent arts institutions around the world. An innovative curator in high demand from arts presenters, museums, and schools, she has held positions including Featured Artist of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra and Artist-in-Residence of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the San Francisco Symphony, where she was also appointed as collaborative partner of Esa-Pekka Salonen. Honored as a 2021 Artist of the Year and “agent of change” by Musical America, Bullock is a prominent voice of social consciousness and activism. As Vanity Fair notes, she is “young, highly successful, [and] politically engaged,” with the “ability to inject each note she sings with a sense of grace and urgency, lending her performances the feel of being both of the moment and incredibly timeless.”

During her Metropolitan Museum residency, Bullock developed and launched three signature projects that went on to flourish nationally and beyond. Her multimedia ensemble program “History’s Persistent Voice” combines songs developed by people enslaved in the United States with visual art, poetry, and new music by B/black female composers, to address the transatlantic slave trade and ongoing search for liberation. Featuring new commissions from local artists wherever it is performed, “History’s Persistent Voice” is continually evolving, taking on new life at each city it tours. In the 2024-25 season, Bullock develops a fresh iteration of the program with New York’s Arktype, a leading producer of experimental new work, following previous “History’s Persistent Voice” presentations for the Met Museum and San Francisco Symphony, which collectively showcased new commissions from Courtney Bryan, Tania León, Allison Loggins-Hull, Jessie Montgomery, Carolyn Yarnell, and Pamela Z. Bullock has had similar impact with El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered, which she devised with contributions from her husband, conductor Christian Reif. A chamber orchestral arrangement of John Adams’s opera-oratorio El Niño, this amplifies the voices of women and Latin American poets through a retelling of the biblical Nativity story. Since premiering it at the Cloisters in New York with the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC*), of which she is a founding core member, Bullock has revisited the work with the Cincinnati Symphony and on a national AMOC* tour. This included a performance at New York’s Cathedral of St. John’s the Divine, where she reprises the production this season, as well as touring it to Sweden and Germany. The third of Bullock’s signature projects is Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, which she conceived in collaboration with director Peter Sellars. Weaving together texts written for the singer by Claudia Rankine with music recomposed for her by Tyshawn Sorey and choreography that she developed with Michael Schumacher, the cycle reexamines the life and legacy of Joséphine Baker. It began life as Josephine Baker: A Portrait, which Bullock premiered at California’s Ojai Music festival, before giving Perle Noire’s world, Boston, and European premieres at New York’s Met Museum, Harvard’s OBERON Theater, and the Dutch National Opera, respectively.

Her operatic career spans repertoire ranging from the Baroque canon to contemporary works written expressly for her voice. After making her Metropolitan Opera debut in John Adams’s El Niño, portraying the Virgin Mary as “a knowing, self-assured young mother-to-be, who sang with warmth and mystery as she wrestled with the human toll of holy purpose” (New York Times), Bullock returns to the Met in spring 2025 to star opposite Gerald Finley in the company premiere of the American composer’s Antony and Cleopatra. Adams wrote the role of the Egyptian queen with Bullock’s voice in mind, and she recently made her house and title role debuts in his opera’s European premiere at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu. The present season also sees her reprise her title role appearance opposite Joyce DiDonato in Katie Mitchell’s staging of Handel’s Theodora at the Teatro Real Madrid, having given her first performances in the role when the production first bowed at London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

Bullock has created several major new operatic roles: Greta, Destiny, and Loneliness in the world premiere of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis; the Daughter, in the premiere production of Michel van der Aa’s Upload at Dutch National Opera, the Bregenz Festival, and New York’s Park Avenue Armory; and Dame Shirley, in the premiere production of Adams’s Girls of the Golden West at San Francisco Opera and Dutch National Opera, to which she “brought an exceptional radiance” (Los Angeles Times). Her key house debuts include the Santa Fe Opera, as Kitty Oppenheimer in Adams’s Doctor Atomic; at Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, as Anne Truelove in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress; and at the English National Opera, Spain’s Teatro Real, and Russia’s Perm Opera House and Bolshoi Theatre in the title role of Purcell’s The Indian Queen. Her wide-ranging repertoire also encompasses the title roles of Massenet’s Cendrillon, Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges, and Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen; Monica in Menotti’s The Medium; Susanna in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro; and Pamina in the same composer’s The Magic Flute, which she has sung in concert with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, at the Edinburgh Festival with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Maxim Emelyanychev, and in a staged Peter Brook production that toured South America.

A favored guest of leading orchestras worldwide, Bullock joins London’s Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment for an all-Baroque program at New York’s 92NY, London’s Southbank Centre, and other key U.S. and UK venues this season. As well as performing Jessie Montgomery’s Five Freedom Songs, a work composed for the singer, as part of “History’s Persistent Voice,” she features it in a New Year’s Eve concert with Cologne’s WDR Symphony Orchestra, and with Jonathon Heyward and the Baltimore Symphony. She sings Britten’s Les Illuminations with the Minnesota Orchestra and Thomas Søndergård, having previously performed the cycle during her San Francisco Symphony residency and in debuts with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra and the Milwaukee and Indianapolis Symphonies. Other signature works include Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, which she has undertaken with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and in season-opening concerts with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. To celebrate Bernstein at 100, she headlined a season-opening gala with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons, as well as making a series of debuts: with the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas; at the Hollywood Bowl, with Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; with Japan’s NHK Symphony, led by Paavo Järvi; and with the New York Philharmonic, in Vail, Santa Barbara, and multiple New York City parks, conducted by Alan Gilbert. Other past concert highlights include collaborations with Roomful of Teeth and the International Contemporary Ensemble, at California’s Ojai Music Festival, and two debuts made at the invitation of Sir Simon Rattle: with the Berlin Philharmonic’s Karajan Academy, in Kaija Saariaho’s La passion de Simone, and with the London Symphony Orchestra, in Maurice Délage’s song cycle Quatre poèmes hindous.

As renowned for her programming choices as her vocalism, Bullock maintains a thriving solo career. This season, she tours California in the American Modern Opera Company’s first American performances of their critically acclaimed dramatic interpretation of Messiaen’s song cycle Harawi, created with director Zack Winokur, pianist Connor Hanick, and dancer-choreographers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber. A champion of her generation, Bullock frequently collaborates with pianists Hanick, John Arida, and Bretton Brown, with whom she recently gave an imaginatively curated recital at London arts nonprofit Bold Tendencies. Under Katie Mitchell’s direction, she and pianist Cédric Tiberghien gave the American, British, Belgian, and Russian premieres of Zauberland (“Magic Land”), a new work juxtaposing Schumann’s Dichterliebe with original songs by Bernard Foccroulle and Martin Crimp. She has also given acclaimed recitals for such prestigious presenters as New York’s Carnegie Hall and Park Avenue Armory, Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, Boston’s Celebrity Series, Washington’s Kennedy Center, and London’s Wigmore Hall.

Bullock made her solo album debut on the Nonesuch label with Walking in the Dark, recorded with her husband, conductor and pianist Christian Reif, and the Philharmonia Orchestra. Combining Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with an aria from El Niño and songs by Oscar Brown Jr., Connie Converse, Sandy Denny, and Billy Taylor, the recording won the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal. Also recognized with Opus Klassik and Edison Klassiek awards, it was featured in the New York Times’s “Best Classical Music Tracks of 2022” and named one of the “Ten Best Classical Albums of 2022” by NPR, which observed: “With its smart, wildly diverse repertoire, Julia Bullock’s Walking in the Dark is an album that shines, introducing us to an artist curating a career on her own distinctive terms.” Bullock also appears on the “definitive recording” (The Guardian) of Adams’ The Girls of the Golden West, made with the composer conducting the LA Philharmonic for Nonesuch, and on the soundtrack of Amazon Prime Video’s The Underground Railroad, composed by Nicholas Britell. Her account of Quatre poèmes hindous with Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra was captured live on DVD, as was her title role appearance in Sellars’s production of The Indian Queen for Sony Classical. Selected as one of the New York Times’s “25 Best Musical Tracks of 2018,” her starring role in Adams’s Doctor Atomic, recorded with the composer conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra, was a nominee for the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. This marked Bullock’s second appearance on a Grammy-nominated recording, following her live account of West Side Story with Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, a Grammy nominee for Best Musical Theater Album in 2014.

Her other honors include the Dallas Symphony Orchestra Award of Excellence, Sphinx Medal of Excellence, a Leonore Annenberg Arts Fellowship, the Richard F. Gold Grant from the Shoshana Foundation, Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, First Prize at the Naumburg International Vocal Competition, and First Prize at the Young Concert Artists International Auditions. She was chosen as one of WQXR’s “19 for 19” artists to watch in 2019” and Opera News’s “18 to Watch in 2018-19”; the New York Times honored her on three of its annual “Best Classical Music” lists, and she has appeared on comparable lists in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Philadelphia Inquirer.

Bullock is in high demand as a speaker in panels on equity, inclusion, and restorative justice in the arts. She has taken part in livestreamed conversations presented by Long Beach Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Music Academy of the West, Sphinx Organization, and others. As well as trying to engage with local communities in each city she visits, she serves on the Advisory Board of Turn The Spotlight, a foundation designed to empower women and people of color, both on stage and behind the scenes, to make a more equitable future in the arts.

Julia Bullock was born in St. Louis, Missouri, where she joined the artist-in-training program at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis while still in high school. She went on to earn her Bachelor’s degree at the Eastman School of Music, her Master’s degree in Bard College’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, and her Artist Diploma at New York’s Juilliard School. It was there that she first met her husband, conductor Christian Reif, with whom she now lives in Munich. The couple welcomed their first child in fall 2022.