Jules Rochielle is the founder of (SPAN) the Social Practices Art Network, and Portable City Projects and a co-founder of Miscellaneous Productions. She is also a consultant that specializes in community arts, community organizing and non-profit sector issues. She has worked with Native Public Media, Public Art Review, Metabolic Studio / Farmlab, Otis College of Art and Design, Freewaves, Access to Media Education Society, Vancouver Moving Theatre/Heart of the City Festival, Full Circle First Nations Performance, and Vancouver International Fringe Festival.
Because of her family background and personal history, she is interested how people create families of choice and how they navigate their lives around issues of equality, economics, family policy and language. She is interested in how people describe and define emerging community structures and non-traditional family arrangements.
Her creative work in this area seeks to surface, describe and support the diverse range of how people choose to define and create both family and community structures that will support them through all stages of their life. She believes that you can build an inclusive dialogue and learn a lot more about community when you simply ask the question, "how do you define that which supports you?".
In March 2012, she will be in residency at Grand Central Art Center, USC Fullerton in Santa Anna, Ca. In May 2012 she will present her work at Open Engagement in Portland, Oregon. She has held artist residencies at LACE (Los Angeles), Knowles West Media Center, (Bristol UK) and with The Sequoia Parks Foundation, (Visalia, CA). In November 2011 Portable City Project was selected to participate in Creative Times’ Living as Form, the Social Practice Archive.
For over 16 years she has been an adult ally to a very special person named Jayka.