Emily Johnson (Yupik)

Emily Johnson is dancer and choreographer whose work often functions as an “installation performance” that combines dance, storytelling vignettes, props, and theater sets. Funding for this project supported Emily in the development of new work centered on movement, story, and sound housed within an installation of hand-made fish skin lanterns. During the project, Emily was influenced by fishing on her father's land in Alaska. She hosted two free fish skin lantern making workshops in the community. She collaborated, developed, workshopped, and performed the performance piece, Niicugni (Listen), with performers, a dramaturge, a costume designer, a composer - in all 8 collaborators and 40 community performers to audiences of over 350 people. One of the audience members remarked, "The multivalent nature of location; spatially, historically, and in respect to the metaphysical presence of the self. The question of whether there is an authentic self, of whether the self is only that which is performed, of whether that is enough. The struggle that resulted in the emergence of the human from nature, which resulted in the human recognition of the other, creating the conditions for love and story and expression and the confusions of love and relationships and history and place and time and narrative."

Emily has been recognized, not just as a Native choreographer and dancer, but as an extraordinary performer by her peers in the field. Her work includes commissions by the Walker Art Center, PS122, Out North, Franconia Sculpture Park, and Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts. She has been presented by theaters across the USA including the Walker Art Center, TBA Festival in Portland, OR, and ODC Theater.  She was a Loft Native InRoads Fellow and her past work has been supported by a Forecast Public ArtWorks Grant, a Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Visual and Expressive Arts Grant with Rhianna Yazzie and Carolyn Anderson, NEFA, a MAP grant with Lisa D'Amour and Katie Pearl, a Blacklock Nature Sanctuary Residency, a Puffin Foundation Grant, a Bush Artist Fellowship, several years of Jerome Artist Fellowships, and a  Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship.