Anna Johnson is a performer, composer, and visual artist who creates multisensory experiences. Based in drone and hypnotic repetition, her devotional sonic landscapes layer textural explorations of voice and electroacoustic instrumentation into a music approaching experimental pop, ambient choral, and psychedelic folk. Anna's performances regularly feature her cinematic projections, which incorporate manipulations of light and shadow to render surreal and fantastical environments. In creating for both stage and screen, she is guided by the emergent, alchemical conversations that open between sound and image when they are brought together. She relies on improvisation and works site-responsively, with a fluid sense of embodied time. Her practice centers instinct and intuition in pursuit of newly vulnerable emotional, spiritual, and social realities.

Anna holds an MFA from the Performance department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently based in Chicago, IL. She was raised with a practice of Celtic and American folk music traditions as well as sacred medieval Christian music, and was classically trained in piano and voice. Between 2018 and 2020, she worked with Mila Vocal Ensemble, a Minnesotan women's choir grounded in Eastern European vocal traditions, with whom she traveled to the Republic of Georgia for training. Anna received a BA in Studio Art from Macalester College and has collaborated as a performer, composer, and art director with bands, devised theatre and puppetry companies, dance ensembles, and film productions for over ten years, in addition to performing and exhibiting her own work in music venues, theatres, galleries, and festivals throughout the Midwestern United States. Following a 2024 performance tour in the United Kingdom and France, she recently completed a month-long tour in North America. Unknowing, Anna’s debut EP under her own name, was released on cassette in Spring 2025 by UK label and distributor Industrial Coast.

CV

contact at annarwjohnson@gmail.com