Julia Vering was born in 1982 in Kansas City, MO. As a teenager, Vering started taking photos of punk bands and abandoned Kansas City sites, publishing them through her zine Athena’s Scapegoat. She became interested in social justice at this time and began volunteer work with Bridging the Gap and Rosebrooks domestic violence shelter, and joined the KC free speech coalition.
At The Evergreen State College, Vering studied social work, experimental animation and electronic music. Inspired by the early performance work of Miranda July and operatic collaborations of Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson, she began integrating personal narratives into meta-story performances. She discovered her love for gerontology through volunteer work at the local senior center, recording oral histories of patrons to set to music and incorporate into performances. She formed an all female conceptual art band, Muñeca Chueca, who performed in clothing purchased at the senior center, and created stop motion animation videos of themselves in wheelchairs and hospital beds from the junkyard. Unicorns in the Snow was born in 2002 as a solo project featuring live music that coincided with her animation video of a headless figure mulling around Vering’s apartment with ceramic unicorns and fake snow.
After graduating with a B.A. in liberal arts in 2003, she started working in activities at a nursing home, where she sought to engage residents in meaningful ways. Vering began experimenting with video-based drama therapy techniques, and noticed that residents with dementia had decreased agitation, increased spontaneous communication and enjoyed themselves while participating. Residents loved watching themselves in the “movies” produced. She organized talent shows and produced training videos starring nursing home residents, allowing opportunities for residents to share their strengths with staff and families.
Vering started taking graduate classes in gerontology and completed her Masters in Social work with emphasis on aging at the University of Kansas in 2008. Vering became a social worker in a long-term care facility. She channeled her frustrations of working within the medical industrial complex to satirical performance piece, Essentially You, featuring mannequin therapy conducted by a personal shopper with a fact-checking projector.
The social work strengths perspective, emphasizing clients’ talents and skills, informs Vering’s process. While employed at Kansas City Presbyterian Manor, she received a Rocket Grant to produce You Live Here Too, a multimedia performance utilizing video, stop-motion animation, an original score, and local senior citizens as actors and oral historians. To highlight the unique abilities of each person, she adapted techniques for memory impairments through the use of fill-in-the-blank cue cards, which engaged participants in life review (e.g. “something I’ll never forget is_____.”)
The Rocket Grant led Vering to a drama therapy position at Jeanne’s Place, a social engagement program for people with dementia. Utilizing green screen technology, drama participants reenact classic TV shows, movies and musicals, which are then screened at the following session. These collective screenings allow memory-impaired participants to re-experience the joy in creating the videos, transcending disability, filling the room with radical laughter.
Vering has worked in hospice since 2012 and earned her Clinical Social Work licensure in 2019. She received Charlotte Street funding to create and perform The Understudy, an experimental multimedia performance piece featuring adults with early stage dementia as narrators, dancers, and actors via duo video projections. She performed the piece in conjunction with a screening of her drama therapy work and the work of artist Anna Azizzy. The show, Mirror Me, Mirrored You, brought together the actors, their families, healthcare workers, people with disabilities and the queer community into a celebration of resilience.
In 2020, Vering received Charlotte Street “Art Where You’re At” funding to perform Re-Enactments, a multimedia performance art piece featuring adults with dementia as actors. Vering worked with the actors to come up with moments from their lives that could be “re-enacted”-such as someone doing the dance to “footloose” on their daughter’s bed to cheer them up. The piece was performed in a storage shed behind Life Care Center nursing facility in Kansas City, KS for the residents, at a “drive in” in a church parking lot in Leawood, KS for the adults with dementia whom Vering collaborated with and their families, and at Our Home Senior Care, a small memory care facility in Shawnee, KS. All performances involved social distancing precautions. Vering hopes the performances provided an escape from reality for facility residents in the audience, and inspired other nursing facility staff to utilize drama therapy techniques.
Vering continues to seek new methods for telling and evoking stories, using expressive arts and technology as therapeutic tools for creating and re-experiencing joy despite memory loss. Her latest performance piece was a re-imagining of Guns n’ Roses November Rain.
She currently owns and operates Expressive Arts Therapy KC LLC, an integrative private practice serving individuals and groups. She became the first Registered Expressive Arts Therapist through the International Association of Expressive Arts Therapy in the state of Kansas in 2023.