I’m Julia Gray
I’ve worked across industries, including arts & culture, education, healthcare and government. I see a common struggle among people to navigate personal and professional lives that often leads to overwhelm and burnout. The answer isn’t to hunker down and power through, it’s to build human-centred and creative lives and workplaces – to focus on communication, relationships, care, social fairness, and making the world better.
I started writing my email newsletter, Fair Play, in 2023 after decades of working as an artist-entrepreneur-academic.
I live in Toronto with my guy and our two hilarious and creative teenagers.
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Want my cred?
Julia Gray (PhD) is an award-winning expert and educator on relational and collaborative working, care and learning.
She has authored academic and practice-oriented publications, as well as public facing writing, about collaboration, humanizing care and work, relational care in teaching and practice, and changing narratives/culture. This work is rooted in her decades-long practice as a community and performing artist. Her academic and professional research in cultural practices, arts, and pedagogy from the University of Toronto introduced a framework – an aesthetic of relationality – that has transformed the way people engage in human-centred practices across industries.
Julia held an award-winning postdoctoral fellowship as an artist-researcher at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital, was an 2021 Visiting Scholar at Sensorium in the School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University, and has taught at the university and college levels, including when she was an Assistant Professor in health humanities at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Julia is an Adjunct Fellow with the Centre for Critical Qualitative Research (Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, and Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Theatre at York University. She sits on the Board of Directors for Red Nose Remedy.
Here are a few examples of projects I’ve been lucky enough to work on:
- Developed opportunities for a wide range of dementia care partners and stakeholders to re-think ‘dementia as tragic’ as part of reducing dementia stigma, including changing practices and policy. Aspects of the project included developing a theatre production, a film, workshops, as well as publishing and presenting to engage different types of people (a joint University of Waterloo-Toronto Rehabilitation project)
- Conducted research about racism, access and belonging for Black students in physiotherapy training programs in Canada (University of Toronto).
- Conducted research and led conversations about the value of the arts, recreation and cultural practices in hospital settings, including events, publications and presentations (Holland Bloorview Kids Rehab Hospital).
- Developed a theoretical framework for performance based research called an aesthetic of relationality, that helps to re-think what gets valued as knowledge and the processes to produce that knowledge (University of Toronto).
photo credit: Lisa MacIntosh