Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. Emily belongs to the Yup’ik Nation, is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty and well-being. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, Emily is based in Lenapehoking/NYC and Haudenosaunee lands. Since 1998, Emily’s large-scale performance gatherings insist thrivance, radical reworlding, and just futures. Her gatherings function as portals and care processions, engaging audienceship within and through space, time, environment – interacting with a place’s architecture, peoples, histories and role in building futures. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.
Emily hosts monthly fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Kai Recollet. Emily was the Pueblo Opera Cultural Council Diplomat at Santa Fe Opera 2018-2020. She was a lead organizer of First Nations Dialogues, a member of Creative Time’s inaugural Think Tank, a co-compiler of the documents, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and Notes for Equitable Funding and is currently co-lead for First Nations Performing Arts.
Emily Johnson/Catalyst, Being Future Being: Land / Celestial, 2022. Photo by Maria Baranova. Courtesy of New York Live Arts.
Pictured: Emily Johnson
