Julia Fox Bio
Julia Francesca Fox, born February 2, 1990, is an Italian-American actress, model, and media personality. She first gained wide public attention for her debut performance in the 2019 A24 film Uncut Gems, a crime thriller directed by the Safdie brothers. She has since become a recognizable figure in fashion and pop culture, known for her bold style and active online presence.
Fox is also an author, director, and entrepreneur who has expanded her work into books, music, and podcasting. In 2023, she released a memoir titled Down the Drain and has collaborated on the Spotify podcast Forbidden Fruits. Across film, television, and editorial work, she has built a varied career that bridges acting, modeling, and creative producing.
Early Life and Background
Fox was born in Milan, in the Lombardy region of Italy, to Gracie, an Italian mother, and Thomas Fox, an American father who worked as a contractor. Her parents split when she and her two siblings were still children. Until the age of six, she was raised largely by her grandfather in the small town of Saronno, outside of Milan, sharing a one-bedroom apartment with her mother’s Catholic family while her mother finished college. During this period, her father lived on a boat docked off New York City.
At age six, she moved to New York City to live with her father in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan, though she continued to visit her mother in Italy regularly. By age 14, she had returned to Italy to attend a private Catholic school with a host family near her mother’s hometown, but was later asked to leave after skipping school. She eventually made her way back to New York and attended City-As-School High School, where she also worked a number of retail jobs in her teens. After high school, she briefly enrolled at the New School in New York City as a media studies major before dropping out.
Path to Acting
Before breaking into film, Fox built a creative career in fashion and the visual arts. She launched a successful luxury women’s knitwear line, Franziska Fox, with her friend Briana Andalore and worked as a model, posing for the final nude edition of Playboy in 2015. She also exhibited as a painter and photographer, and self-published two photography books, Symptomatic of a Relationship Gone Sour: Heartburn/Nausea in 2015 and PTSD in 2016. In 2017, she hosted the art exhibit R.I.P. Julia Fox, which featured silk canvases painted with her own blood.
Her transition to acting came after nearly a decade of friendship with filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie. Fox met Josh Safdie by chance at a café in SoHo, Manhattan, and the relationship eventually led to her being cast in the Safdie brothers’ A24 feature Uncut Gems. Her performance in the film marked her feature debut and introduced her to a global audience, earning her a nomination for Breakthrough Actor at the 2019 Gotham Awards.
Julia Fox Career
Early Career (2015–2018)
Fox’s early professional years were shaped by fashion, art, and independent creative projects. Beginning in 2015, she modeled for the last nude edition of Playboy, while also developing her own clothing line, Franziska Fox, and publishing photography books. She appeared in editorial work for titles such as CR Fashion Book, Paper, V, and Interview, and booked campaigns for brands including Diesel, Coach New York, and Supreme.
She expanded into nightlife and entrepreneurship as a co-owner and investor of a Lower East Side nightclub called Happy Ending, which closed in 2013, and she later moved into film and short-form directing. Her earliest on-screen work, including a short film about young women in sex work in Reno, helped lay the groundwork for her transition to feature acting.
Breakthrough (2019–2024)
Fox’s breakthrough arrived with Uncut Gems in 2019, in which she played a showroom saleswoman and the mistress of Adam Sandler’s character, the gambling-addicted jeweler Howard Ratner. The role earned her a Gotham Award nomination for Breakthrough Actor and established her as a distinctive screen presence. She followed that success with the Ben Hozie-directed PVT Chat, released in the United States on February 5, 2021, in which she played a cam girl named Scarlet.
She went on to appear in Steven Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move, released on July 1, 2021, and starred in the 2022 drama Puppet. In 2024, she starred in the dark comedy The Trainer opposite Vito Schnabel and Steven Van Zandt, directed by Tony Kaye, and was announced for the action-thriller The Deputy alongside Tiffany Haddish and William H. Macy. She also joined the cast of the 2024 American TV series Fantasmas, and in 2025 she guest starred in Adults.
Notable Works and Milestones
Her signature work remains Uncut Gems, the role that introduced her to audiences and earned her first major award nomination. She has continued to build a filmography that mixes independent features, festival projects, and larger studio productions, while expanding her creative footprint as a director, writer, and executive producer on projects such as Something You Said Last Night and Idiotka, the latter of which she also executive produced in March 2025.
Julia Fox Award Nominations
Fox has earned recognition from independent film awards bodies early in her acting career. Her most prominent nomination came in 2019, when she was nominated for the Gotham Awards Breakthrough Actor prize for her performance in Uncut Gems, marking one of the first major industry acknowledgments of her screen work.
Julia Fox Awards Won
There are no verified major award wins on record for Julia Fox based on the available sources. As a result, no awards table is included, and this section is limited to confirmed nominations to keep the record accurate.
Julia Fox Family
Fox was born to Thomas Fox, an American father who worked as a contractor, and Gracie, her Italian mother. Her parents separated when she and her two siblings were still children, and she was raised in part by her grandfather in Saronno, Italy, before moving to New York to live with her father. She has spoken about difficult relationships with both parents during her youth.
In November 2018, she married Peter Artemiev, and the couple had a son born in 2021. Their divorce was finalized in July 2020. After the birth of her son, Fox has publicly discussed experiencing postpartum depression and has spoken about her diagnoses of bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, and autism.
Personal Life
Fox resides in Yorkville, Manhattan, and has a son born in 2021 from her marriage to Peter Artemiev, which ended in divorce in 2020. She has described periods of relative homelessness and personal struggle during her teens, and has spoken publicly about her sobriety following the fentanyl-related death of a close friend in 2019.
In January 2022, Fox confirmed in an Interview magazine article that she was dating rapper Kanye West, though the relationship ended the following month. She has since spoken about practicing celibacy beginning in late 2021 or early 2022, and in 2024 publicly identified as a lesbian on TikTok before clarifying in a 2025 Allure profile that she identifies as pansexual. In October 2023, she published her memoir Down the Drain with Simon & Schuster, and in 2024 she performed her debut single of the same name. A TV adaptation of the memoir is in development with Joey Soloway.