JILL JOHNSON

JILL JOHNSON is a dancer, choreographer, artistic director, and dance educator. She has danced in over 60 tours on 5 continents. She was a principal dancer in William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet and Director of Dance at Harvard University.

 

Johnson’s commissioned works for dance include Resonance - PST:ART When Art & Science Collide with the LA Dance Project, in partnership with the Getty Foundation (Los Angeles,) Analogue for Rambert Dance at the Stone Nest, and at Riverstage 2024 (London,) Wake for the LA Dance Project and Qatar Creates at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar during the 2023 World Cup, The Arboretum Experience for the American Repertory Theater (Boston,) and The Copier for Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, (New York City.) 

 

Ms. Johnson has produced dance, opera, and theater productions for American Repertory Theater, Sadler’s Wells Theater, The Louvre, PBS’s Poetry in America, Los Angeles Dance Project, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, The Getty Museum, Princeton University, Columbia University, The New School, the Juilliard School, and New York University.

 

She has held artist residencies at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, The New School University, and New York University.

 

Collaborators of note include Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Diane Paulus, Dries Van Noten, and V (formerly known as Eve Eisler.) 

 

Ms. Johnson has staged work around the world, including at the Paris Opera Ballet, La Scala, Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, Netherlands Dance Theater in the Hague, Norwegian National Ballet, San Francisco Ballet and American Ballet Theater. She has taught master classes at the Edinburgh Festival, Palucca Schule of Dresden, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and Radcliffe Institute, The Alvin Ailey School, and Yale University, and moderated public talks at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, Onassis Cultural Center, Athens, the Mahindra Center for the Humanities, Neiman Fellows Program, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is a founding collaborator of The Movement Invention Project, New York.

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During her decade as Director of Dance at Harvard, Johnson centered equity and inclusion across all programming, creating a transformative interdisciplinary curriculum design that culminated in the Harvard Dance Center DEI Strategic Priorities legacy project. She produced 91 master classes with 86 guest artists, 31 world premiere dance works for students choreographed by some of the most-celebrated artists in the dance field, helped create 18 new credit courses and free community classes to reflect changing dynamics in the arts, established multiple initiatives for emerging student choreographers and dancers, created cross-disciplinary collaborations with a plethora of university-wide programs and departments, and vastly increased the donor base for dance education. In 2013, she founded the Harvard Dance Project, a performance ensemble that focuses on performance research, collaboration, choreographic composition, and links choreographic thinking to other fields.

 

An honors graduate of Canada’s National Ballet School, Johnson’s career began as a soloist with the National Ballet of Canada before she joined Ballet Frankfurt. She received widespread critical acclaim as a co-collaborator and featured performer in Forsythe's A Quiet Evening of Dance, and danced in all 89 performances of its international tour.

 

Her most recent work Analogue for Rambert was hailed as "mind-blowing" by Bachtrack, "fabulous" by The Guardian and portraying a "collective sense of yearning" by The Stage.

 

Ms. Johnson is currently based in Los Angeles.