Emily Johnson is a director/choreographer/curator, originally from Alaska and currently based in Minneapolis. Her company, Catalyst, has performed since 1998. Johnson works to make deliberate meaning, random association, and powerful movement the essential aspects of dance pieces that are thought-provoking and entertaining.

Emily Johnson grew up in her native Alaska playing basketball and running long distance. At 18 she left rural living, moved to Minneapolis, and quite by accident, learned to become a choreographer and performer. For the past 14 years city living has swirled around her, dragging her, literally, away from the physical space of Alaska and the summer and fall family rituals of hunting and fishing, then smoking, drying, canning and freezing food. She is pulled back, conceptually, when midwesterners and others ask her if she lived in an igloo (myth), if she has an Eskimo name (no), and if it is OK to say the word "Eskimo" (it is, but only sometimes). She is of Yup'ik decent, though she does not speak the language. Emotionally, she is tied to the landscape of South Central Alaska where she was born and to the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta, where her father's family is from.

For the past ten years, Emily has created work from socially conscious and emotionally driven perspectives. Her work includes commissions by the Walker Art Center, OutNorth Contemporary Art House, Franconia Sculpture Park, Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts, Red Eye Theater, and Macalester College. She has been presented by Franconia Sculpture Park, Links Hall, Dance Umbrella, the Walker Art Center, ODC Theater, Velocity, and the Southern Theater. She has toured with Scuba and NPN and self-presented in numerous venues including DTW, Rogue Buddha Art Gallery in Minneapolis, and the Que'Ana Bar in Clam Gulch, Alaska. She has embarked on performance projects in Montreal, St. Petersburg, and Amsterdam and toured her work to 14 American states. Her dance films have screened at the Walker, DTW, Chicago Cultural Center and university film festivals. She is a 2009 MANCC choreographer fellow. She teaches movement workshops in the USA and abroad and is the recipient of a Forecast Public ArtWorks Grant (2008), Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Visual and Expressive Arts Grant (2008), MAP grant with Lisa D'Amour and Katie Pearl (2008), Blacklock Nature Sanctuary Residency (2007), Puffin Foundation Grant (2005), Bush Artist Fellowship (2004), Jerome Artist Fellowship (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004), and Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship (2001).

Emily has created dances about love, global warming, violence, memory, missed opportunity, regret, hope, mean people, and home. She has made large cast dances for public spaces with people of varied genders, ages, cultures, and physical abilities. She has collaborated with musicians, visual and video artists, sculptors, writers and geothermal scientists to make work born from the joining of creative forces. She takes her inspiration from the annual migration of salmon, who swim upstream for thousands of miles because they must. She has watched these salmon swim up waterfalls and she believes humans can also be called to do amazing things. Recently, someone told her that she makes dance for "the dance snobs" and she makes dance for "people who generally don't like dance." She would like to think that is true; she would like to think that her dances are for every body and that maybe they enlighten small aspects of our existence.

IEmily writes about dance and performance in the online magazine, Mental Contagion.