IvyHouseStudio — Brooklyn’s Creative Hub
IvyHouseStudio has been a hub for creatives and grew up with Bushwick. Owned by Julie Miller, photographer, more recently a director, and a visionary who put her heart and soul into this space. “I’ve had the space for 10 years and you name it, it’s happened — one night there’s a trap like a party and then the next morning a yoga class.”
She stumbled on the building we know as IvyHouseStudio when she was helping her tenant look for a new space. The floorboards had holes, the walls had cracks, and there was even a garden in the parking lot. That side of Bushwick at the time was “junkies and prostitutes — I dreamed about this place every since night for a month but as a beautiful studio.” She went back to the real estate agent and he told her that no one wants it and the landlord would offer a huge discount — it was like it was waiting for her.
Julie built out the space, working on it every night sometimes until 4 AM. “My degenerate friends would stop by until all hours of the morning and bring drinks” and that’s when she decided to turn the space into one of the first venues in the center of this old warehouse part of Brooklyn.
“It was hard in the beginning to get people” since people coming in from Manhattan didn’t want to go into Brooklyn. Yet, she was able to start up her career and some of her closest friends. They started doing test shoots and throwing underground parties there — and now they curate huge sponsored events and shoot for fashion week.
When we were in the production lull, everyone was itching to get back in the game — even to work for free. We are a world of busybodies who want to create and help.
She has partnerships with equipment — Lightbulb and Grip right around the corner and Below the Line next door, who she was co-working with until COVID hit. “They have anything people would need. Everyone who works with them are the nicest people, I have nothing but great things to say about all of them.”
With events, she can now have 25 people and it’s allowed events to focus on the individual experience again. She’s had parties, album releases, music videos, and watch parties. It’s all about getting creative with the world we have.
She’s open to help artists with rates, just as she did when she started. “There’s a renaissance happening in Brooklyn...This fantasy playing itself out with the integration of arts again — the class separation has also created a bond” where before, we shied away, now we’re all coming together!
In the near future, she’s looking to build an IvyHouseStudio upstate about two hours north of the city. In the meantime, you can rent her Brooklyn studio on ArtCube Market!
Within her own work, she shared, “I really like shooting people — portraits and showing their whole self in an image.” Before COVID, she shot a lot of celebrity hip hop and artist portraits. When she does shoot for fashion “I like to be weird and creative with it.” Over the years people always told her she should direct because she connects and engages with clients to show their deepest selves in the photos. She wants to bring back the stylized MTV music videos with weird sets. crazy angles and a whole different world rather than just walking down the street. “We have so many resources to make things cool” so let’s have fun with it!”
Julie Miller, Owner of IvyHouseStudio
20/20 is a term used to describe perfect vision, but the term itself is limiting to the physical world. You need to see through reality into the astral to properly quantify Miller’s talents. A digital camera might be able to break down an image to pixels written in binary codes, but it takes an artist to make that code flesh. Julie doesn’t just photograph you, or your product or event, she captures the feels, and makes them breathe in 2 dimensions. Her photoshopping skills, although immaculate, doesn’t begin to sing the sonnets that commence the minute her flash goes off.
Nobody is shy in front of her white backdrop. The colors don’t fade under her filters. And her images might as well have been immortalized by a 3D printer. Before Kendrick Lamar brought all of his homies to the White House, Julie canvassed his blackness. Before Khaled got lost at sea on a jet-ski, he slid into the front of her camera lens for his magazine cover. The names range from local deities to international phenoms. From your basic BBQ flyer to advertisements seen internationally, her humility far overshadows her talents, as she’s a photographer for every day.
Trained in all major creative disciplines — from fashion to fine arts — Miller has decades of expertise packaged in a body of enthusiasm that will take your anxieties to actualization. Like a friend that knows the name and lyrics of the song you’re humming, struggling to come up with the words, maybe’s don’t exist in her studio, and possibilities are never short on promise.
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