Born in 1968, Julie Bertuccelli studied philosophy and then worked for around ten years as a director’s assistant on numerous feature films, TV films and shorts, with Otar Iosseliani, Rithy Panh, Krysztof Kieslowski, Emmanuel Finkiel, Bertrand Tavernier, Jean-Louis Bertuccelli, Christian de Chalonge, René Féret, Pierre Etaix, etc.

Following her introduction to documentary filmmaking in 1993 at the Ateliers Varan, she made ten documentaries for Arte, France 3 and France 5, including Un métier comme un autre, Une liberté!, La Fabrique des juges, Bienvenue au grand magasin, Un monde en fusion, Otar Iosseliani le merle siffleur, Le Mystère Glasberg and Antoinette Fouque – qu’est-ce qu’une femme?...

Her first fictional feature film, Depuis qu’Otar est parti (Since Otar Left) received some twenty prizes in France and abroad, including the Grand Prix de la Semaine de la Critique at the 2003 Cannes Festival, the César for best first work in 2004, the 2003 Prix Marguerite Duras and the 2003 Prix Michel d’Ornano in Deauville. L’arbre, her second fictional feature film, shot in Australia, was an official selection in the 2010 Cannes Festival.

Her documentary La cour de Babel (School of Babel,) which came to theaters in 2014, received a César and was crowned Best Documentary from Trophées francophones du cinéma.

She was president of SCAM, Société civile des auteurs multimédia, between June 2013 and June 2015, the first woman to hold that position. She has been co-president of the ARP, Société civile des Auteurs-Réalisateurs-Producteurs since June 2016.

Her feature film, Claire Darling's Last Madness with Catherine Deneuve and Chiara Mastroianni, was released in theaters in February 2019.