My Work
Musicals | Plays | Lyrics
I create to explore.
I create to connect.
I create to disturb the peace.
Temple MFA Thesis Musical
Set in the 1930s, Mystic Rapture follows Celeste, a young Black woman from a family of Hoodoo practitioners, embarks on a journey to reunite her estranged relatives. Drawn into a world of magic and spectacle, she discovers that her Aunt Scarlett, the family's enigmatic matriarch, has formed a dazzling magic troupe of outcasts from all walks of life. As Celeste becomes entwined with the troupe, long-buried family resentments and past mistakes threaten to tear them further apart. Forced to confront the weight of generational curses and the allure of newfound belonging, she must decide whether breaking the chains of the past is worth risking the only family she has left.
A tale of belonging, legacy, and the morally gray choices we make in a world that was never built for us, Mystic Rapture is a hypnotic journey of magic, identity, and redemption.
Book & Lyrics by Julissa Mishay Norment
Music by Jaime Jarrett
Direction by Megan Nicole O’Brien
Dugout Daisies wins 2023 Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival
10 Minute Play, Dramatic Comedy / 2w
Best friends and teammates, Fefe and Tae are benchwarmers in softball and also in life. During the longest inning *ever*, they unearth their joys, burdens and differences as a pair of weird, boy crazy and jaded black girls. They navigate the complex shades of their adolescent experiences and laugh about how deliberately undervalued they are. They wait in the dugout and long for their lives to begin — or at least for this inning to be over.
Upcoming!
Upcoming!
Julissa has been commissioned to write a new children’s musical, collaborating with book writer Brandi Underwood and composer Joe Barsanti for Yes! And… Collaborative Arts’ Sort of Thing musical theater youth program. This exciting new project is set to premiere in Spring 2026.
new play in development with Dramaturg Kemi King
Julissa’s new play, A Hot Day in Summer ’07, has been selected for the Digital Development Project: The Match. They are collaborating with producer, director, and dramaturg Kemi King on this hood surrealist dark comedy.
On the hottest day of summer in 2007, three overworked, adultified, and disenfranchised camp counselors—Zeke, Kella, and Remi—struggle to keep an understaffed summer camp in inner-city Houston from falling apart. Just when they think the day can’t get any worse, their most beloved camper goes missing, forcing them to confront the childhoods they never truly got to have. As they search, the lines between reality and something far stranger begin to blur, revealing just how much growing up too fast can distort the world around you.