Julia Cameron

Julia Cameron

Julia B. Cameron, born March 4, 1948, is an American teacher, author, artist, poet, playwright, novelist, filmmaker, composer, and journalist. She was born in Libertyville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and was raised Catholic as the second oldest of seven children. Her education began at Georgetown University and continued at Fordham University. Before she became closely associated with books on creativity, she worked as a journalist, writing for The Washington Post and then Rolling Stone.

Cameron is best known for The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, published in 1992 by Jeremy P. Tarcher/Perigee. The book grew out of her work teaching creative unblocking. Before formal publication, she sold Xeroxed copies in a local bookstore. Its central idea, as described in her work, is that creativity is an authentic spiritual path. That idea has remained the through-line of much of her nonfiction, including The Right to Write in 1998, Walking in this World in 2003, Finding Water in 2006, The Artist’s Way Every Day in 2009, and later books such as The Listening Path in 2021, Write for Life in 2023, and Living the Artist’s Way in 2024.

Her working life has crossed many forms. Cameron has written nonfiction, short stories, essays, novels, plays, musicals, screenplays, and poetry. Her fiction includes The Dark Room and Popcorn: Hollywood Stories. Her plays include Four Roses, Public Lives, and The Animal in the Trees; her musicals include Avalon, Magellan, and The Medium at Large. In film and television, her credits include an episode of Miami Vice and the independent movie God’s Will. She also collaborated on three films with Martin Scorsese, whom she met while on assignment for Oui Magazine.

Cameron married Scorsese in 1976, and they divorced in 1977. Their daughter, Domenica Cameron-Scorsese, was born in 1976. Cameron later wrote about a difficult period in her memoir Floor Sample, published in 2006, describing her descent into alcoholism and drug addiction, with blackouts, paranoia, and psychosis. In 1978, when writing and drinking could no longer coexist, she stopped abusing drugs and alcohol. From that point, her teaching of creative unblocking became a central part of her life and work.

She has taught filmmaking, creative unblocking, and writing at institutions including The Smithsonian, Esalen, the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, and the New York Open Center. At Northwestern University, she served as writer in residence for film. In 2008, she taught a New York Open Center class called The Right to Write, named and modeled after one of her bestselling books. Cameron has lived in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., and she lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her words still speak to people who want to make art without waiting to feel flawless: “Progress, not perfection, is what we should be asking of ourselves.”