Julie has practiced and taught architecture with a focus on sustainable design for over 25 years. She received her undergraduate and graduate Architecture degrees from the University of Virginia, where she received the AIA School Medal of Excellence. She was a founding principal of TerraLogos eco architecture and has had a solo practice in Baltimore for the last fourteen years. In 2013, her firm, Gabrielli Design Studio, was named Baltimore Magazine's Best Remodeling Architect. Award-winning work has included architectural design, green design consulting, climate action planning, organizational sustainability initiatives and strategic retreats, story workshops, and graphic facilitation of meetings. She has worked with both the LEED Rating System and Enterprise Green Communities. She was a faculty advisor for Maryland’s 2007 Solar Decathlon entry, LEAFHouse, which placed second overall, first in the U.S.
Julie teaches Ecological Design Thinking and co-coordinates the Integrated Design Studio, ARCH 600/611. In fall 2018, the ARCH 600/611 studio worked with clients from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, along with professional engineering and architectural consultants, to study design approaches for a net-zero, site-integrated scientific field study station in a sensitive marshland on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The final report, “Charting a Way Forward: Research at Monie Bay,” includes findings and recommendations of how to foster mutually beneficial relationships between building and site, between researchers and the wider community, between science and the mysteries of natural systems, and between this generation and the next.
Julie is also a writer and painter. The essays and watercolors on her blog, Thriving on the Threshold, explore this time of living between the cultural stories of separation from or belonging to the natural world. Her writing has been published online; in magazines "Ecological Home Ideas" and "Urbanite;" and in literary journals: Dark Mountain Journals #6, #8 and #10; "Dark Matter" #3 and "Immanence." She participated in the 2019 Orion Environmental Writers Workshop and is currently at work on a novel. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland with her husband, teenage son and a big dancing bear of a dog named Brody.