We had the good fortune of connecting with Julia Gorbach and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Julia, what habits do you feel play an important role in your life?

  • Be a joyful, wild mind. Commit to treating life and work as an experiment and the world as a playground. Follow your curiosity.
  • Connect the dots. Apply your experiences and learnings from one opportunity to the next and compound your learnings.
  • Invest in yourself. Carve out time to center yourself and do the work of understanding who you are.  Commit yourself to your personal evolution as a human and as a creator by understanding your conditioning and limiting beliefs, by identifying what lights you up and energizes you, by defining success for yourself, and ultimately designing your own path in alignment with yourself.
  • Train your mind, follow your intuition. We’re living in a world designed for logic and mental decisions, but oftentimes the right call won’t be made by your mind.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I’m an Emmy award-winning creator, innovator, and filmmaker. I conceive and create work across mediums and platforms, including generative art, chat bots, web apps, interactive experiences, film, social, and more. A hybrid by design, I’m driven by an insatiable curiosity for new experiences and ways of seeing the world – or what someone once called a “joyful wild mind.”

I’ve approached my work journey as an experiment, creating opportunities to learn and grow. At times it seemed like a pretty winding journey to get to where I am today, yet it all seems to make sense when you connect the dots in hindsight. My experience spans independent film, immersive storytelling, emerging technology, advertising, and fashion. I’ve also worked in many different roles, including: actor, writer, director, producer, artist, content creator (video, photo, copy), curator, creative director, creative strategist, and concept designer.
There have been a few defining career moments for me that introduced me to new ways of working and thinking. My time at The Skin Deep as a Founding Member + Filmmaker, where I created, directed, wrote, and produced original interactive and digital documentaries, including the Emmy and World Press Photo winning interactive documentary and series {THE AND} (theand.us), World Press Photo award winning interactive documentary The Dig (thedig.tv), and digital series like The Window and Senior Orientation. In addition, I built the infrastructure of how we work, created apps and merchandise that invites viewers to play at home, and designed our global residency program expanding {THE AND} filming to 6 continents.
Afterwards, I was a member of the New Museum incubator called NEW INC where I kickstarted my career as an independent creator working at the intersection of hybrid storytelling and emerging technologies. Then, I worked as a creative strategist, branded content director, and creative where my work explored the intersection of conceptual and existential themes of the human experience and worldbuilding questions. Clients include: Ford, Bloomberg, Grubhub, Seamless, No Kid Hungry, 2020 Census, Sotheby’s, Walmart, Food Network, Condé Nast, Public Policy Lab, and The Oratory Laboratory.
Currently, I’m the Director of Originals at THAT, where my job is to creatively lead and incubate original work that clients aren’t ready to buy yet, while paving the way for a new way of collaborating with outside creators. Inspired by the experimental nature of Google Experiments, my team is committed to engaging with emerging technologies as a collaborator to tell stories, solve problems, and create desire. It’s been an honor to create Version THAT (versionth.at) a machine that uses the language of famous authors to create new versions of your words, Face THAT (faceth.at) a virtual camera that replaces your face with virtual foregrounds so you can be somewhere new, and Webby Honoree “Closed Up,” a weird internet film featuring 20 artists and experts trying to connect in the digital space at the beginning of lockdown as their hyper-real conference call becomes infected with a virus and takes over their cameras leaving us all asking, “what happens next?” (https://vimeo.com/471188227).

Follow your #joyfulwildmind.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?

Shout out to: 
➜ My family for showing me the power of hard work and determination, courage, love, kindness, and great sense of humor
➜ My life partner and husband Nikola Chapelle for his unconditional love, laughs, patience, and faith. 
➜ Fellow creators and team of NEW INC for community, inspiration, and space to create my own ideas
➜ OG team at The Skin Deep for opening my heart, becoming my family, and for teaching me
➜ OG team at THAT [Technology, Humans, and Taste] for opening my mind, giving me space to follow my curiosity, and teaching me the value of process, problem-solving, and experimentation
➜ Fellow creators, friends, entrepreneurs, festivals, and communities for inspiring me and broadening the scope of what’s possible: IDFA Doclab, Sundance New Frontiers, FoST, Tribeca, ISET, MIT Docubase, Murmur Co, Rava Films, Verrecchia Film, Kraft Paris, #Dysturb, Native Agency, Ladies Get Paid, NYC Women Filmmakers, Women’s Weekend Film Challenge, 67 West, and all the friends in Brooklyn, Paris, and Kyiv.
➜ My coach Tori Hoffman for creating the space for my evolution

Website: http://www.juliagorbach.com

Instagram: @jgorbach

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-gorbach/

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