Emily Johnson / Catalyst

In Fellowship 2026

Emily Johnson, a Yup’ik woman, stands at the edge of the East River in Lenapehoking. She has long black hair, and wears a vibrant facemask designed by artist Jeffrey Gibson, with the letters POWER and FULL on it. Her arms are raised over her head and she holds up a hand-written sign that reads “GATHER HERE”. Behind her, the gray water is spotted with ducks, and some of the Manahatta skyline is visible.

Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. Emily belongs to the Yup'ik Nation and is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty, and well-being. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Awardee, United States Artists Fellow, Braiding Seeds Fellow, Forge Project Fellow, Center CIRCL Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, Emily is based in Lenapehoking. 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’s performance gatherings are presented across what is currently called the United States, Canada, and Australia. Her current project, Overflow Radio, is a performance, skill-share, planting of 1000 trees, and radio transmission taking place over 24 non-consecutive hours within a massive quilt installation and across geographies and territories.

Emily hosts monthly fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Urban Cree scholar Kai Recollet. She was the Pueblo Opera Cultural Council Diplomat at Santa Fe Opera 2018–2020, a lead organizer of First Nations Dialogues, a member of Creative Time’s inaugural Think Tank, and a co-compiler of the documents Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and Notes for Equitable Funding. Emily served as Social Practice Resident at Kennedy Center for the Arts (2021–2022), is a Social Practice Artist in Residence at Abrons Arts Center (2019–present) and co-lead of First Nations Performing Arts.

A dozen figures stand, slighting crouching and bending at the knee, along the shallow steps of a plaza in front of Abrons Art Center. They face one figure at the bottom of the shallow arena who stands next to a fire pit. — Emily Johnson / Catalyst, Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter, March 25, 2021. Presenter(s): devynn emory, Asiiya Wadud, SJ Norman, and Joseph M. Pierce. Photo by Ash Gilbertson.

A woman and young daughter dig in the sand on the shores of the Far Rockaway. — A woman and young daughter dig in the sand on the shores of the Far Rockaway during Emily Johnson / Catalyst's SHORE on Lenapehoking.