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 is a means of processing and embracing the force of change, with projects that ask questions of intimacy and interrelation. She engages elements of ritual and works site-responsively, in pursuit of new emotional, spiritual, and social realities.

Anna’s sound is a textural exploration of voice and electroacoustic instrumentation. Drawing from backgrounds in classical, traditional, and religious musics, her compositions encompass choral ambience, drone, and experimental pop. She relies on improvisation and layered repetition, with a meandering, fluid sense of embodied time. Her performance work features atmospheric projection installation that plays with scale and perspective through the use of live cameras and manipulations of light, shadow, and objects. Drawing from cinema, phantasmagoria, and puppet theatre, Anna's visual style foregrounds illusion and abstraction of the everyday, with a sense of the uncanny and the fantastical. In creating for both stage and screen, she is guided by the emergent relationships and unique conversational dimensions 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.

Photo by Erin Lynch