Unknowing EP available now

Anna Johnson is a performer, composer and visual artist who creates experiences at the boundaries of sound, moving image and installation. Her practice centers body and intuition as primary sites of knowledge, in pursuit of newly vulnerable emotional, spiritual, and social realities. Anna’s hypnotic, devotional sonic landscapes are drawn from explorations of voice and electroacoustic instrumentation. With backgrounds in classical, traditional, and religious musics, her sound weaves medieval-influenced vocal melodies, chants, and choral layering with synthesizer atmospheres, heavy drone textures, and forays into experimental pop. She relies on improvisation, with a meandering, fluid sense of embodied time. Anna's performances regularly feature her cinematic projections, which use live cameras and manipulations of light and shadow to render surreal and fantastical environments. 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. She has presented work throughout the Midwestern United States for over ten years at galleries and venues including Chicago's Elastic Arts, Constellation, Links Hall, the Hideout, and Roman Susan; Minneapolis's Red Eye Theater, Open Eye Figure Theatre, Mirror Lab, and the Cedar Cultural Center's Drone Not Drones festival; and at the 2023 Ann Arbor Film Festival, where she premiered an award-winning film. She recently toured in the United Kingdom and France, which included a performance curated by Industrial Coast at Sonic Arts Festival (Middlesbrough, England) and a performance curated by R.Æ.V.E (Dijon, France). Her August 2025 North American tour features performances at venues including Berlin (Minneapolis), Rhizome (DC), AS220 (Providence), and Intercomm (Queens, NY), among others. Anna released her debut EP Unknowing on cassette in Spring 2025 through UK-based label and distributor Industrial Coast.