About
Julia Henley & Woodshire Studio
Woodshire Studio is the professional and publishing platform of Julia Henley — designer, writer, civic leader, and caregiving advocate with deep roots in the Driftless and Great Lakes region. Her career spans professional residential and commercial design, neighborhood planning, EDA-funded disaster recovery coordination, nonprofit co-founding, conference speaking, Emmy-winning documentary production, and the editorial work of Woodshire Studio itself.
Julia is a professional designer with a career spanning residential and commercial work — from individual homes and interiors to commercial projects, adaptive reuse, and community facilities. That design practice runs through everything she does: the way she approaches a neighborhood, reads a building, or thinks about what a place asks of the people who live in it.
Her professional design work has included the development of neighborhood building and landscaping standards — among them requirements for tree planting to ensure long-lived, desirable neighborhoods that reduce resource waste and resist sprawl. Communities where she has contributed in this capacity include Meier Farms, Clearwater Farm Neighborhood, Savannah Village, and Savannah Oaks, along with many private residential and commercial clients.
Her writing and projects explore the intersection of the built and natural environment, water stewardship, regional identity, caregiving, and the practical imagination required to build communities worth living in — and thriving personally through caregiving and connection.
Woodshire Studio is a hub for thought leadership, essays, book reviews, project development, publishing, regional commentary, sustainability, design, and carefully curated recommendations. It is a place for ideas that take place seriously.
Through Woodshire Studio, Julia publishes her own writing and the work of other contributors on topics that connect health, the built environment, the wild landscape, and the communities we share. The studio is a gathering point for voices thinking seriously about how we live, where we live, and what we owe to the places and people around us.
Based in the Upper Midwest, Julia brings a designer's rigor and a writer's eye to questions that matter: How do we design for resilience? What does a healthy watershed require of us? What books help us think more clearly about the world we're building?
Julia is also a voice in caregiving advocacy. She has written and spoken plainly about the reality that unpaid family caregivers — the majority of them women — perform the bulk of care work in this country, often at significant personal cost. The financial penalties, career interruptions, and emotional toll borne by family caregivers are not private misfortunes. They are the predictable outcomes of systems that have never been designed to support the people doing this work.