Anna Johnson is a musician and visual artist who creates embodied experiences at the boundaries of sound, moving image and installation. Her work navigates intimacy and interrelation on physical, emotional and spiritual registers. She seeks to open charged and sensual spaces that invite full presence, and is invested in ritualistic live art as a channel for vulnerability, trance and cathartic release.

Anna’s compositions explore the textures of voice, synthesizer, acoustic instruments and electronics. With backgrounds in classical, traditional, religious and improvised musics, her sound encompasses choral ambience, experimental pop and heavy drone. She engages improvisation and layered repetition in pursuit of a meandering, fluid sense of body-time. Anna’s performances incorporate atmospheric projection installation that uses live cameras and manipulations of light, shadow and objects to play with scale and perspective. Her visual style foregrounds illusion and abstraction of the everyday, which draws from a history of cinema, pre-cinema and live animation, including the arts of puppetry and phantasmagoria. She is compelled by and seeks to render a sense of the uncanny, the mysterious 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 currently based in Chicago, IL.

Photo by Erin Lynch