Meet Julie B. Johnson, Ph.D.

Biography

Faculty Member Since 2016

Julie B. Johnson, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of dance and performance choreography.

Dr. Johnson is a dance artist and educator driven by the ways that dance can serve as a practice of inquiry, empathy, and empowerment. Her work centers on participatory dance and embodied memory mapping to amplify the histories, lived experiences, and bodily knowledge of Black women as a strategy towards collective liberation for all. She does this work joyfully with community partners through her creative practice, Moving Our Stories (established in 2015), and at Spelman College where she serves as an Assistant Professor of the Department of Dance Performance and Choreography. She brings this work to the publishing realm as a co-founder/consulting editor of The Dancer-Citizen, an online open-access scholarly dance journal exploring the work of socially engaged artists.

Since 2019, Dr. Johnson has explored the intersections of archival and embodied memory research, site-responsive creative practice, and abolitionist feminism through community-based participatory dance research endeavors such as Idle Crimes & Heavy Work; For the Record… Dances to Stop Cop City; The Georgia Incarceration Performance Project; and most recently, Dancing in Darktown, which focuses on the history turn of the twentieth century dance halls in Atlanta and their relationship to Progressive-era carceral politics.

Dr. Johnson is honored to have been selected as a 2022-23 Dance/USA Artist Fellow with a cohort of 30 national artists; and a Partners for Change Artist as part of the inaugural 2020-23 cohort through Alternate ROOTS and The Surdna Foundation. She is also the recipient of the inaugural Mellon-Funded Mini Research Grant through Spelman College’s Institute for Gender & Sexuality Studies in support of ICHW. Dr. Johnson was a 2021 Distinguished Fellow in-residence at the Hambidge Center made possible through the Georgia Council on the Arts Scholarship, and a member of the 2020-21 cohort of the Jacob’s Pillow Curriculum in Motion Institute. In 2019, she received the Arbes Award and Black Spatial Relics Residency Award for her work on Idle Crimes & Heavy Work, and she was a Hughley Artist Fellow as part of the final 2018-2019 cohort.

Dr. Johnson’s recent publications include: “The Future is Behind, Too” (2025) published by In Dance; “Ardent Dreams and Provocations: A Contribution to Black Women's Dance Histories,” which she edited for The Dancer-Citizen along with guest editors Dr. Takiyah Nur Amin and Dr. Saroya Corbett; “From Warm-up to Dobale: Experiences of Community in a West African Dance Class” (2019) in the anthology Hot Feet and Social Change: African Dance and Diaspora Communities, which was published as part of the United Nation’s International Decade on People of the African Diaspora and features and preface and foreword by Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover respectively; and “Dancing for Justice Philadelphia: Embodiment, Dance, and Social Change” (2020) in African American Art: Aesthetics, Activism, and Futurity.

Dr. Johnson earned a Ph.D. in dance studies at Temple University's Boyer College of Music and Dance, researching meanings and experiences of ‘community’ in Philadelphia-based West African Dance classes.

Websites:

• Dr. Julie Johnson Website

• Dancer Citizen

• Idle Crimes

Education

• B.A., Northeastern University New York City (formerly Marymount Manhattan College)

• M.S., Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy

• Ph.D. Temple University's Boyer College of Music and Dance

Research Interests

• Intersections of creative practice, community interaction, and social justice

• African Diaspora movement practices

• Embodied memory