About Johanna

Performance poet, dancer, director and artist educator, Johanna Walker has been writing and performing poems and stories for over ten years. She has performed at St. Mark's Church, Nuyorican Poets Café, Bowery Poetry Club and WOW Theater Cafe in New York City, Cleveland Public Theater, Thorne's Marketplace and Wildlife Sanctuary in Northampton, and at improvisation festivals and schools throughout New England and the Midlands. She has also performed in subways, intersections, parks, cafeterias, bathrooms, beaches and museums. She's been a member of the intergenerational dance company Dance Generators in Northampton for 5 years, performing with them in schools, community centers, senior centers and formal theaters. Johanna grew up making performances in her basement with her brother and sisters and continues to impact her community by organizing performances that showcase a wide rang of local performers and that include the audience in the artistic process.

Certified by Amherst Writers and Artists Institute, she leads writing and movement groups for adolescent girls, adult women and women in jail, and leads residencies for elementary and high school aged students in schools throughout New England. She loves the process of supporting people who think they "can't write" or "can't dance" and watching them discover they can, as well as people who can't stop writing and can't stop dancing and watching them discover they don't have to stop! In all of her groups she makes a welcome and nurturing space for each individual's genius to shine through.

In the residencies she leads, Johanna is committed to working with teachers and staff to create projects that support the curriculum as well as open doors for new possibilities in creative expression. As spoken by one teacher-collaborator, "…the students remember what they have learned more vividly because it does not just blend in with what they think of when they imagine 'school.'" Her programs include a wide variety of in-school activities, public workshops and community events, drawing parents, teachers and students together to find new connections with each other and with their learning.

Both her teaching and performing work invites participants and audiences to tell their own stories, listening with ears and eyes and hearts to the stories in our own bodies and in the world around us. Johanna's solo work has been praised for its ability to tap a responsive chord in all of us. She combines text, movement, honesty, humor and tells stories in a way that brings life and breath to the smallest detail. Both in schools and in formal performances, Johanna has the ability to make poems sing, sending audiences away with poems and stories in their heads and on the tips of their fingers ready to fly out.

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