Julia Hartsell is a dancer, writer and ritualist who has been catalyzing community around healing and movement for decades. With a background in performance art and world religions, Julia has spent her life immersed in embodied practices. Trusting the body’s inherent wisdom, she utilizes diverse practices to help access intuition, emotional expression and transformation. An animist, her work is focused on reclaiming sane and sacred ways of living and dying.

Julia’s known for her global influence on Hoop Dance and her local contribution to the Triangle’s Ecstatic Dance culture. For ten years, she mothered The Flowjo, a dance and circus studio in Carrboro, NC which hosted the first Ecstatic Dance in the Triangle. Before that, she ran an International Dance Conference, Hoop Convergence, for 9 years. She’s danced her way around the region and the globe spreading her passion for movement as a healing practice. In the past decade, she’s developed movement-based Grief Ceremonies, Ritual Dances and Ancestral Dance practices for reconnection, reverence and healing.

Julia is Co-founder, Director and Liturgist at Heartward Sanctuary, an arts-based temple grounds and natural cemetery in Silk Hope, NC where she tends several shrines, graves, an earth-based liturgical cycle, a multi-generational community and a weekly Temple Dance.

Her work is consistently growing and evolving. Julia supports people through thresholds of all kinds. She is a trained Ancestral Lineage Healing Practitioner, PsychoPomp, Death Doula & Home Funeral Guide.

Her movement practices and studies include: Hoop Dance, Ecstatic Dance, Continuum, Authentic Movement, 5 Rhythms, AcroYoga, Flow & Circus Arts and Contact Improvisation. Over the past twenty years, she’s had the pleasure of working with people of all ages in a variety of settings, programs and modalities.

Julia currently resides in Silk Hope, traditional lands of the Shakori, Sissipihaw and Catawba tribes, with her beloved partner, canine companion and a wake of vultures.