Anna Johnson creates at intersections of performance, sound, moving image and installation. Her work explores intimacy and interrelation as they manifest on emotional and spiritual registers within the body. She works site-specifically, in embodied conversation with the unique architectures, energies, and potentials for live experience within every space. With vocal expression as her artistic center of gravity, her practice foregrounds embodiment and somatic experiencing. She engages play and ritual as interwoven creative approaches to navigating the elastic nature of time.

Anna approaches image and sound making as symbiotic and emergent processes that serve as guiding scores for one another to reveal the worlds imagined within her work. Her sound practice experiments primarily with vocalization, synthesizer and electroacoustic processing as a means of composing auditory landscapes that augment and extend the materials of her voice and instruments. She is influenced by Western classical, traditional and devotional choral musics as well as the voices of nonhumans and both natural and industrial environments. Through improvisation and layered repetition, her compositions pursue states of consciousness that seek personal and collective experiences of transformation. Anna’s practice of image-making, rooted in experimental cinema and stage design, incorporates live cameras, projection installation, and manipulation of light and objects in order to render magnified, phantasmagoric atmospheres. By producing illusions, she aims to warp perception, alter one’s sense of scale, and render the familiar unfamiliar. Through the experiential shift that occurs when she abstracts and magnifies images and sounds in her live work, she aims to bring her audiences into a state of active attention and curiosity that initiates full sensory participation and presence.

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