Unknowing EP available now

Anna Johnson is a performer, composer and visual artist creating experiences at the boundaries of sound, moving image and installation. She centers body and intuition as primary sites of knowledge and points of departure. Her practice seeks to embrace the force of change and asks questions of intimacy and interrelation. She engages dimensions of ritual and works site-responsively, in pursuit of newly vulnerable emotional, spiritual, and social realities.

With backgrounds in classical, traditional, and religious musics, Anna’s sonic landscapes are drawn from textural explorations of voice and electroacoustic instrumentation. Her sound weaves medieval-influenced vocal melodies, chants, and choral layering with ethereal synthesizer atmospheres, heavy drone textures, and forays into experimental pop. She relies on improvisation, with a meandering, fluid sense of embodied time. Often incorporating her own live visuals and installation, Anna’s performances offer sensual, cinematic environments. Her atmospheric projections play with magnification and perspective through the use of live cameras and manipulations of light and shadow. Drawing from cinema, phantasmagoria, and puppet theatre, Anna’s visual style foregrounds illusion and abstraction, characterized by the uncanny and the fantastical. 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.

Anna holds an MFA from the Performance department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is based in Chicago, IL.