Julianne considers herself a writer who takes photographs. She has studied writing with Tim O'Brien, Sharon Dilworth, Tom Barbash, and Rebecca McClanahan, and has worked as a teacher, an editor, a translator, and a photographer.

From childhood, she's always loved to read about religion, history, psychology, and spirituality; at Sarah Lawrence College, she studied literature and comparative religion.

In 1989 she went on her first extended trip to Italy and found a more sensual and immediate way of engaging in daily life. Years later she learned about the Neoplatonists of the Italian Renaissance when she read Care of the Soul, by Thomas Moore. She has gone on to research their philosophy, finding them to be 'spiritual ancestors' in their syncretic approach to religion, and in their appreciation of the natural world and artistic creation.

She reveres His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Sri Dharma Mittra, and also finds inspiration and guidance from such writers as Marsilio Ficino, Giordano Bruno, Carl Jung, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Troward, Tulku Thondup, James Hillman, and Thomas Moore. Among the many fiction writers she admires are Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Penelope Fitzgerald, Michel Faber, and Haruki Murakami.

Currently, she's in Venice, Italy, completing a book with photographs about the connection between the art and philosophy of the Italian Renaissance. She's also writing an historical novel that takes place in 16th century Venice.