Julie Sulzen

Julie Sulzen has been painting professionally for over 25 years in Chicago, focusing primarily on urban landscape painting. She has exhibited with the National Museum of Women in the Arts (at Neiman Marcus in Chicago), at The Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts (solo), the Hairpin Arts Center, Around the Coyote, Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festivals, and numerous group and solo shows including at her namesake studio Sulzen Fine Art Studio. Julie Sulzen has given lectures about her art at the Racine Art Museum, the Self Employment in the Arts Conference (Chicago), The Chicago Architecture Center (Chicago Architectural Foundation), The Chicago Tourism Center, as well as Concordia and Dominican Universities.

As a native Chicagoan, Sulzen began her studies at Lane Technical High School and went on to study drawing, painting, and illustration at The American Academy of Art under renowned artists such as Bill Parks, Irving Shapiro, and Lou Ann Burkhardt. Sulzen studied privately under the portrait and still life painter Grace Cole and earned her BA with a focus on printmaking and photography under Betty Ann Mocek, Nikkole Huss, Maria Gedroc, and Debra Herman at Concordia University Chicago (receiving a Special Honors in Art from the College of Arts and Sciences).

Julie Sulzen creates images of people, homes, neighborhoods, and the built environment, in order to bring an understanding of the emotional and aesthetic ties that people have to their surroundings. As a wife, mother, painter, and lifelong Chicago resident, she asks questions about her own gendered and class-status relationships within her community to help tell the particular stories of her experiences through art. Sulzen aims to share her knowledge, offer encouragement, and give guidance to students on their own unique path in the world of art.