About Lucky Plush Productions
Led by choreographer Julia Rhoads, Lucky Plush Productions is a Chicago-based dance theater company that creates immersive environments through striking visual design and a movement vocabulary that is lush, intricate, and conceptually derived. Since founding in 1999, Lucky Plush has facilitated the relationship between dance, performance 
and new media technologies, offering a distinctive interdisciplinary platform for innovative artists in Chicago. The development of choreography is always the starting point, and it is the refracting of dance through experiments in other media that leads the company in new directions.
Lucky Plush Productions has premiered 28 original works including performance installations, 2 dance films and 7 evening-length productions. A distinct integration of dance with theater and visual design has located Lucky Plush Productions in a wide range of venues including Cusp Conference 2008, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, PAC/edge Performance Festival, and site-specific locations including Chicago’s Millennium Park and Great Hall in Union Station, and the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Features in publications include the cover story of Time Out Chicago’s “5 reasons to love dance in Chicago,” the Chicago Sun Times’ “lasting memories in dance” (2005 & 2007), the Chicago Tribune’s article “Best of Dance 2008,” and a 2008 review in Dance Magazine where it was noted “there is little doubt Lucky Plush will continue to evolve in its exciting efforts to integrate artistic forms.” For more information about Lucky Plush Productions, visit www.luckyplush.com.
Julia Rhoads, Artistic Director
Julia Rhoads is a choreographer who has been described as “Chicago’s resident surrealist” in the Chicago Sun Times, and “adept at both provocative and humorous material” in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. In 1999, she founded the dance theater company Lucky Plush Productions, and has since created over 25 original works with the company including performance installations, 2 dance films and 6 evening-length interdisciplinary productions.
As an independent artist, Rhoads’ work has been presented in venues and universities across the U.S including commissions for Alaska Dance Theater, Mordine & Company Dance Theater, and twice for River North Chicago Dance Company. She has also directed and choreographed for theater, performance and film companies including Redmoon Theater, Walkabout Theater, Hyperdelic, and the interdisciplinary collective M5. Rhoads is formerly a company member of the San Francisco Ballet, a performer and artistic associate of XSIGHT! Performance Group, and she has been a guest artist with Beppie Blankert Danceworks, the Itinerant Theater Guild, and Baubo Performance Project.
Rhoads has received a Cliff Dwellers Foundation Award for Choreography, two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships for Choreography, a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award, and a fellowship from the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. Rhoads earned a BA in History from Northwestern University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute Chicago, and she is currently a part-time faculty member in the theater department at Columbia College Chicago.
