Anna Johnson is a performer, composer and visual artist who creates 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 inevitable force of change, and her projects ask questions of intimacy and interrelation. She engages ritual and works site-specifically in order to invite intention and vulnerability, in pursuit of new emotional, spiritual, and social realities.

Anna’s sound is a textural, electronic exploration of voice, synthesizer and guitar. Drawing from backgrounds in classical, traditional, and religious musics, her compositions encompass choral ambience, drone, and experimental pop. She employs improvisation and layered repetition to render a meandering, trance-like 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, her 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