2010-2011 Lab Artist

Emily Johnson

Emily Johnson is a director/choreographer/curator, originally from Alaska and currently based in Minneapolis. Since 1998 she has created work about the experience of sensing AND seeing performance; her pieces often function as installations, engaging audiences within and through a space and environment – sights, sounds, smells – as well as a place's architecture, history, and role in community. She works to blur distinctions between performance and daily life and to create work that reveals and respects multiple perspectives. This allows for the possibility of multiple meanings - with a goal of stimulating reflection and emotional empathy between performer and audience, and between audience members. Her work has toured across the USA and in Montreal and Russia. She is a  2010 McKnight Fellow and was a 2009 MANCC Choreographer Fellow.

Emily grew up in her native Alaska playing basketball and running long distance. At 18 she left rural living, moved to Minneapolis, and quite by accident, learned to become a choreographer and performer. For the past 16 years, city living has swirled around her, dragging her, literally, away from the physical space of Alaska and the summer and fall family rituals of hunting and fishing, then smoking, drying, canning and freezing food. She is pulled back, conceptually, when midwesterners and others ask her if she lived in an igloo (myth), if she has an Eskimo name (no), and if it is OK to say the word "Eskimo" (it is, but only sometimes). She is of Yup'ik descent, though she does not speak the language – yet. Emotionally, she is tied to the landscape of South Central Alaska where she was born and to the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta, where her father's family is from. Learn more about Emily Johnson and Catalyst at www catalystdance.com