Julie Jordan Gunn has spent her life in the arts playing, conducting, producing, and teaching. She is devoted to building spaces where all generations can develop their talents, tell our communities’ stories and inhabit their creative potential.
Trained as a pianist, she has been heard with many of the greatest art song, opera, and musical theatre singers, especially her husband and artistic partner, Nathan Gunn, on many of the world’s most prestigious recital series, including the Aspen Festival, Boston’s Celebrity Series, Brussel’s La Monnaie, the Carnegie Hall Pure Voice Series, the Cliburn Foundation, Lincoln Center Great Performers, Manhattan’s Café Carlyle, the Ravinia Festival, St. Paul’s Schubert Club, the Sydney Opera House, Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, London’s Wigmore Hall and the United States Supreme Court.
In commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, they were proud to produce a multi-media concert honoring America’s poets—Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Allison Adele Hedge Coke--entitled “I hear America Singing,” in partnership with the Peoria Riverfront Museum. The concert is traveling throughout the United States with a video installation of Americans of all walks of life reciting the Declaration.
A member of the faculty at the University of Illinois School of Music, Dr. Gunn engages students in all sorts of musical collaborations, teaching songwriting, chamber music, vocal coaching and accompanying, vocal literature, career preparation, stage management and design for sung theatre, the producing of opera and musical theatre, and performing arts leadership. Dr. Gunn enjoys working at the intersection of different disciplines and collaborates with artists in the fields of theatre, dance, and design whenever possible. She is committed to the development, production and resonance of new works and in recent seasons has been part of several world premieres and workshops, as a producer, a pianist, or as a conductor. They include staged works like Black Square (Demutsky), Candinho (Ripper), PRISM (Reid), The Surrogate (Macklay), Sensorium Ex (Prestini), Take Flight! (Maultby and Shire) and Bhutto (Fairouz), often in collaboration with Beth Morrison Projects, and concert works by Iain Bell, Augusta Read Thomas, Jennifer Higdon, and Harold Meltzer. She mounts workshops and public performances of student compositions in musical theatre and opera each year.
