Julia Franklin is an Iowa-based installation artist, advocate, mother, and nonprofit arts leader whose immersive, multi-sensory environments explore memory, identity, and storytelling through found objects. As Executive Director of Mainframe Studios, she champions artists in central Iowa. Franklin is an Iowa Artist Fellow who exhibits nationally and builds creative communities through her own practice and collaborative arts initiatives.

Franklin uses found objects to tell stories about what we leave behind and creates immersive environments rooted in nostalgia. These multi-sensory spaces blur the lines between art and artifact, installation and theatre, and often become sets for happenings and collaborative performances. Her recent body of work, Belonging(s), re-examines her father’s 1990 suicide to explore what we conceal to protect others and to spark conversations about loss, identity, and mental health.

Franklin collects worn, forgotten, and intensely personal objects—relics that still hold stories. Whether scavenged from trails, thrift stores, or abandoned places, these items speak through their authenticity and evidence of use. She carefully curate and reframe them so viewers can uncover layers of history, mystery, and emotion. Each object becomes a clue, a memory, a moment rescued and uplifted.

Inspired by nature and family, she transform spaces using everyday items—letters, books, bedsheets, furniture—combined with wax, salt, moss, and sound. These installations invite participation: potluck dinners around kitchen tables, or adult-sized blanket forts for quiet reflection. When visitors explore these spaces, they become part of the work itself—a shared act of connection, preservation, and redemption.