Julia Pascal

Profile

Julia Pascal trained and worked as an actor, in theatre, film and radio, before becoming a playwright and theatre director. At King’s College London she is a Research Fellow and, at Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, a Visiting Artist. She gained her PhD from the University of York in 2016 with her thesis ‘The Absence of Female Jewish Characters on the Postwar English Stage: 1945-2016’.  For the Jewish Historical Society of England, she has produced a research study ‘Blackpool Jews’. Her project ‘Discovering & Documenting England’s Lost Jews’, was funded by the Lottery Heritage Fund.  She was Writer-in-Residence at the Wiener Library and recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. Methuen, Faber, Samuel French (Inc) and Editions de l’Amandier publish her dramas, most of which focus on Jewish histories. Her scripts include Blueprint Medea, 12:37, A Manchester Girlhood, A Dead Woman on Holiday, Theresa, Honeypot, The Yiddish Queen Lear, The Dybbuk, Crossing Jerusalem, St Joan, Woman in the Moon, Nineveh, Woman on the Bridge, Broken English, Year Zero, The Golem and The Shylock Play. As a writer/director her community theatre productions have centred on the lives of buried women’s histories, including classicists Jane Harrison and Helen Tirard whose achievements were celebrated in Ulyssa in 2024 at Senate House for the Bloomsbury Festival. Her next production, As Happy As God in France, which reveals Eva Daube, Charlotte Salomon and Hannah Arendt’s imprisonment in Gurs, will premiere in 2026. During her tenure of the Miller Visiting Fellowship, Julia will explore the archive of Berthold Auerbach who escaped the Nazis and came to Britain in 1939.  His work, as a prominent Berlin theatrical agent, resonates with her own practice which investigates, and is inspired by, early 20th-century German theatre.