Hello there, I’m Julie!

I visited Morocco for the first time in March 2023 and felt a visceral need to burn my entire life down and stay. It didn’t feel like discovering something new, it felt like remembering a place I was from. Born and raised in Denver, I had a life that made sense from the outside. I am an artist with my own business: Studio Lupino, and was also the co-owner of a craft gallery/gift boutique. I had a beautiful home and garden. I split my days between the shop, art fairs, and my home studio… creating cards and collages I sent to 60 stores across the US. I had the most ridiculously incredible printmaking, clay, and framing studio in the basement and a letterpress in the garage. It was the stuff of my childhood dreams. A life I had worked steadily to build. And then I met Morocco and something older, quieter and more essential woke up. For the next two and a half years, I lived in the tension of two lives… slowly setting myself up to move to Morocco while also simultaneously fighting the desire, because it wasn’t what I felt I was “supposed” to do. Now, I’m carving out a life that doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen modeled. Slower. More intentional. Less certain. I’m learning to trust where the wind takes me, without needing to know exactly where I’ll land.

As I’ve been writing, different textures have emerged, and I’m leaning into them. Some are fragments, some are held more carefully, some are written from the middle of the thing while they’re still coming apart.