Emily Johnson (Yup’ik, lives and works in Lenapehoking/New York City, USA) is an artist who makes body-based work. She 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 she has created work since 1998 that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions, they engage audienceship within and through space, time, and environment- interacting with a place’s architecture, peoples, history and role in building futures. Johnson 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 ceremonial fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center and Karyn Recollet. She was a co-compiler of the document, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts, serves on Creative Time’s inaugural Think Tank, and is part of a consortium developing the First Nations Performing Arts Network.
Programs
Being Future Beings
Location: Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto
A gathering. An invitation. A speculative architecture. A sounding. A call. In Being Future Beings, choreographer and artist Emily Johnson performs a body-based work within and in response to 2022 Biennial artist Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition, I AM YOUR RELATIVE. The performance marks the second collaboration between the two, who previously…