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; co-curator with film director Ava DuVernay’s Array of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Rock My Soul Festival; and artist-in-residence of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Berkeley’s Cal Performances and the San Francisco Symphony, where she was appointed as collaborative partner of Esa-Pekka Salonen. Bullock is also a prominent voice of social consciousness and activism. As The New York Times notes, she is “one of the singular artists of her generation — a singer of enveloping tone, startlingly mature presence and unusually sophisticated insight into culture, society and history.”

Bullock opened her 2025–26 season with a program of Gershwin and Bonds with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and Ingo Metzmacher, before joining Petr Popelka and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the world premiere performances of Song of the Reappeared, a new orchestral song cycle commissioned by the CSO from Matthew Aucoin, who composed it expressly for her. With Sweden’s Gävle Symphony and her husband, conductor Christian Reif, she sings Poulenc’s monodrama La Voix humaine. On a U.S. recital tour with cellist Seth Parker Woods and pianist Conor Hanick, one of her frequent collaborators, she premieres a new Tania León commission alongside music by Maurice Ravel, André Previn, George Walker, Robert Owens and Nina Simone at UCLA, the University of Chicago, New York’s 92Y, Virginia Tech and her own alma mater, the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. At Australia’s Adelaide Festival, she reprises two of her signature projects: Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, with music by Tyshawn Sorey, and El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered, with music by John Adams. Then, as the 2026 Festival Director of the Cincinnati May Festival, she curates a series of concerts and activities to honor its storied history and reflect her own artistic vision.

Last season, Bullock returned to New York’s Metropolitan Opera to star alongside Gerald Finley in Elkhanah Pulitzer’s company premiere production of John Adams’ Antony and Cleopatra, with the composer conducting. Adams wrote the role of the Egyptian queen with Bullock’s voice in mind, and the opera’s European premiere was previously the vehicle for her house and title role debuts at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu. Alongside Joyce DiDonato and Iestyn Davies, she reprised her title role appearance in Katie Mitchell’s staging of Handel’s Theodora at Madrid’s Teatro Real, having debuted in the part when the production first opened at Covent Garden. With London’s Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, she toured an all-Baroque program to New York’s 92Y, Washington, D.C.’s Library of Congress, London’s Southbank Centre and other key U.S. and U.K. destinations. As a founding core member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC*), she gave the first American performances of their critically acclaimed dramatic interpretation of Messiaen’s song cycle Harawi. She also gave chamber orchestral performances of Adams’ El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered in New York, Munich and Sweden; sang Britten’s Les Illuminations with the Minnesota Orchestra; and reprised Jessie Montgomery’s Five Freedom Songs, a work she developed with the composer, on a U.S. tour with the Baltimore Symphony, at a New Year’s concert with Germany’s WDR Symphony Orchestra and as part of her History’s Persistent Voice program at Yale University and New York’s Lincoln Center.

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. Presentations for the Met Museum, San Francisco Symphony and Lincoln Center collectively showcased new commissions from Courtney Bryan, Cassie Kinoshi, Tania León, Allison Loggins-Hull, Jessie Montgomery, Carolyn Yarnell, and Pamela Z. Bullock made a similar impact with El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered, a distillation of John Adams’ opera-oratorio El Niño that amplifies the voices of women and Latin American poets through a retelling of the biblical Nativity story. She premiered this with AMOC* in a chamber orchestral arrangement devised by Christian Reif at the Cloisters in New York. Since then, she and Reif have revisited the work in annual concerts with the Cincinnati Symphony; with Sweden’s Gävle Symphony Orchestra, the Münchner Rundfunksorchester and Bayerische Rundfunks Chor; on a national AMOC* tour; and in annual holiday concerts with AMOC* at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Her third signature project is Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, 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 and across the U.S., before giving Perle Noire’s world and European premieres at New York’s Met Museum and the Dutch National Opera.

Her operatic career spans repertoire ranging from the Baroque canon to contemporary works written expressly for her voice. Bullock made her Metropolitan Opera debut in John Adams’ 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” (The New York Times). She 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’ 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’ Doctor Atomic; at London’s Royal Opera House and Madrid’s Teatro Real in the title role of Theodora; 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 performed Britten’s Les Illuminations during her San Francisco Symphony residency and in debuts with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra Ireland, the Minnesota Orchestra and the Milwaukee and Indianapolis symphony orchestras. 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. Bullock has often performed orchestral arrangements of songs by American composers George Gershwin and Margaret Bonds, most notably with Gilbert and Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra. 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. A champion of her generation, she frequently collaborates with pianists Conor 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’ 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’ “Best Classical Music Tracks of 2022” and named alongside rap and pop recordings as one of the “50 Best 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 The Underground Railroad, a limited series directed by Barry Jenkins, with music by Nicholas Britell, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. 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’ production of The Indian Queen for Sony Classical. Selected as one of The New York Times’ “25 Best Musical Tracks of 2018,” her starring role in Adams’ 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.

Bullock was a keynote graduation speaker and a Distinguished Alumna at The Eastman School of Music. 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 Musical America’s 2021 Artists of the Year, WQXR’s “19 for 19” artists to watch in 2019,” and Opera News’ “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 herbachelor’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. In the fall of 2022, the couple welcomed their first child. juliabullock.com