Julia van de Graaff
writer/actor Under Water
Julia van de Graaff graduated in 1994 from the acting department of the renowned Maastricht Academy for Dramatic Arts in the Netherlands.
She started her career at the National Theatre and played a wide variety of parts with various Dutch theatre companies such as Theaterhuis Alba, Mighty Society, Blau Hynder and Bonte Hond. She wrote her own lines for Waterlanders at the National Theatre and Feeling Blue by Drang.
After her graduation, Julia collaborated many times with theatre group Golden Palace, which strongly influenced her further development as an actress and initiator of theatre performances. At Golden Palace she further developed het writing skills by writing her own lines based on improvisation. Between 2000 and 2002 she wrote and directed four radio plays commissioned by OHM for radio 5.
In 2007 she initiated her first play, Deathkit, for which she translated and adapted Susan Sontag’s novel.
King, sweet king (2012) by Paul Pourveur at Zeelandia, was a play about the confectioners’ sugar empire ‘Van Melle’ based on interviews by Julia with her family from Zeeland Flanders, in which she also performed.
In 2015 Julia founded LYNX and initially focused on producing theatre. The Second World was LYNX’s first performance about Secret Service informants and opposition members behind the Iron Curtain; it was based on Julia’s interviews with her Polish-Russian family, in which she also performed. The Second World mixed musical theatre with film projections and animation. The piece toured the Netherlands and Belgium and played at the New Epiphanies Festival in Warsaw, Poland.
In 2020 Julia decided to take a new step from theatre to film with LYNX. LYNX Film produced for Zeelandia Sober directed by Joël Duinkerke, which was in official selection for Raindance 2021 and won Best Foreign Short at TOPAZ Film Festival. Based on a monologue from King, sweet king, Julia wrote the screenplay for this short in which she played the main character of Adriana.
Under Water by Edgar Kapp and Kuba Szutkowski is the first feature produced by LYNX Film. It is an adaptation of Apocalypse How (2019) by Simon Weeda, a theatre play, based on an idea by Julia. It is a dark offbeat comedy drama about survival of the fittest, rabbit holes of conspiracy theories and a challenging childhood. Julia, who plays one of the protagonists, is also co-writer of the screenplay.
For television, Julia played many guest roles in Dutch series and acted in a number of (short) films such as Femi, Spin of Youth and Sledgehammer by Kuba Szutkowski and Edgar Kapp.