Julia Reimer

Associate Professor, LCC International University, Lithuania

Julia Reimer, PhD, is an academic, arts educator, and theatre artist-director. She is an associate professor at LCC International University in Klaipėda where she co-facilitates applied theatre projects around theatre for social action, peacebuilding, and reminiscence theatre. Social impact theatre projects in her home-base of the United States have included Shakespeare literacy programs, youth theatre programs, drama-in-education work, devising, intergenerational drama, performance ethnographies, and historical reconstruction projects applying practice as research (PaR) strategies to undergraduate theatre education. Project partners have included local artists, theatre companies, libraries, schools, and social service agencies. Her publication, Negotiating the Blade: A Dramatic Reverie on Faith, Institutions, and Theater applies the creative analytic practice (CAP) of autoethnography to uncover tensions in the practice of theatre at a religiously-framed institution.

Her presentation “Imagining an Arts-Based Research Practice: An Ethnodrama in Three Acts”, examines practice-based performance research as both inquiry and representation. Combining ethnographic tools like "thick descriptions," interviews, and theoretical lenses with an experimental, poiesis-driven approach, it explores how lived experience can be conveyed beyond traditional social scientific paradigms. Structured as a three-act ethnodrama, it integrates research methodology, performative representation, and an academic-style conclusion, demonstrating the theoretical and embodied dimensions of arts-based research.