The German-Japanese mezzo-soprano Julia Kurig Yazaki (b. 2003) grew up alternately in Freiburg im Breisgau and Chigasaki.

Since October 2022, she has been studying for a Bachelor's degree with Prof. Lioba Braun at the Cologne University of Music and Dance.

She has received scholarships from the Hans and Eugenia Jütting Foundation in Stendal and the Richard Wagner Association. She is currently a recipient of the Deutschlandstipendium. She won the Joanna & Gene Farber Young Talent Prize of the 7th International Haydn Competition for Classical Lied and Aria in 2025 and is a prizewinner of the Lions Club Music Prize in Karlsruhe 2022.

 In 2024, she won the prize of the Vrienden van het Lied auditions and regularly performs recitals in the Netherlands as part of this programme.

Further concert solo and duo engagements have taken her to the Internationaal lied festival Zeist (with her programme "Excludable Femininity: Female Identity in Art Songs") and to other festivals such as the Festival International de Música Sacra Granada and Paxos Music Festival alongside the cellist and gamba player Amarilis Dueñas Castán. She has also performed at the Festival Internacional de Música "Ciudad Monumental de Cáceres" or at the 'Klänge der Stadt' festival in Bergisch Gladbach.

In April 2026, she sang the role of Zita in the opera "Gianni Schicchi" in a production by the Rheinische Opernakademie at the Cologne University of Music and Dance. Two years earlier, she sang the role of Dorinda in the opera "Le trame deluse" at the same venue. 

In December 2025, she sang the role of Hänsel in the opera "Hänsel und Gretel" with the MusikTheater RheinBerg. 

Furthermore, in 2023, she sang her first opera role of Domitiano in the German premiere of the baroque opera "Il Tito" by Antonio Cesti in a university production. 

Important teachers in her life include the voice and breath teacher  Sabine Seidel, with whom she began her singing career at an early age, Prof. Ulrich Eisenlohr, and Prof. Elisabeth Glauser. Her artistic training is complemented by lessons with Michael Gees, Prof. Hans Eijsackers and others.

She was also a long-standing member of the Mädchenkantorei am Freiburger Münster. 

In addition to her great love of opera, she has devoted herself intensively to the interpretation and research of art song. She specialises in the interpretation of 20th-century Japanese art songs, contemporary art songs, and the work of female composers.

April 2026- No modification of this biography without permission.