Dr. Julie B. Johnson

Julie B. Johnson, PhD, is a dance artist and educator working in the intersections of creative practice and research, African Diaspora movement aesthetics, community interaction, and social justice. Julie is on faculty Spelman College in the Department of Dance Performance & Choreography and the African Diaspora & the World Program. She serves as the Curator for Spelman’s lecture series, Inside the Dancers’ Studio, uniting audiences and artists to engage in unique creative practices, innovative scholarship, and leading strategies in the field of dance. Julie is a co-founding editor of The Dancer-Citizen, an online, peer-reviewed, open-access dance journal exploring the work of socially engaged artists; and is Executive Artistic Director of Moving Our Stories, LLC, a exploring the ways memory lives and moves in our bodies. Julie serves as a co-director of The Georgia Incarceration Performance Project, a devised archives-to-performance collaboration bringing the history of incarceration and convict labor in Georgia to life through embodied archival research, and created the associated performance and video installation Idle Crimes & Heavy Work, a focusing on black women’s experiences within this history. Julie earned a PhD in Dance Studies at Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance, where her research focused on meanings and experiences of ‘community’ in a West African Dance class in Philadelphia.