Jill Johnson

JILL JOHNSON is an internationally renowned dancer, choreographer, artistic director, educator, producer, stager, movement advisor, and consultant. She has danced in over 60 tours on 5 continents. She was a principal dancer in William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt and Director of Dance at Harvard University. Ms. Johnson’s leadership in the field brings into service four decades of experience and vast interdisciplinary knowledge of diverse repertoires and methodologies to realize visionary, world-class commissions and programming, develop the next generation of artist leaders, and reimagine how the arts can engage, intersect, and interact with all people.

An honors graduate of Canada’s National Ballet School, Ms. Johnson was a soloist with the National Ballet of Canada and has been a key collaborator of Forsythe’s for 35-years. She is a sought-after expert in Forsythe’s methodologies and has staged his work around the world for 25-years. Including at the Paris Opera Ballet, La Scala, Batsheva Dance Company, Netherlands Dance Theater, Norwegian National Ballet, San Francisco Ballet and American Ballet Theater. Ms. Johnson
helped to stage Forsythe’s Limb’s Theorem at the Bayerisches Staatsballett, in 2004. At Paris Opera Ballet in 2016, she helped to assist Mr. Forsythe in the creation of Blake Works I.

Ms. Johnson choreographs for stage, film and television. Including, opera and theater productions for American RepertoryTheater, The Louvre Museum and Dries Van Noten, PBS’s Poetry in America, Rover UK, The Juilliard School, Los Angeles Dance Project, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, and The Getty Museum, and has held artist residencies at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, Princeton University, The New School University, Columbia University, and
New York University. Some collaborators of note include Mikhail Baryshnikov, V (Eve Ensler), Diane Paulus, and the late Ryuichi Sakamoto.

During her decade-long tenure at Harvard University, Ms. Johnson served on the faculty, founded the Harvard Dance Project, and created a transformative interdisciplinary curriculum across all programming and in unprecedented interdepartmental collaborations. She has taught master classes including those at the Edinburgh Festival, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and Graduate School of Education, 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 Foundation Fellows Program, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and is a founding collaborator of The Movement Invention Project, NYC.

She garnered widespread critical acclaim as a co-collaborator and featured performer in William Forsythe’s most recent full-length production A Quiet Evening of Dance and danced in 89 performances of the production on an international tour. “Astonishing…” wrote the New York Times of her dancing in this production. “Ms. Johnson brings an unassuming clarity and articulation to Mr. Forsythe’s movement that feels like it comes from the deepest of places. All night long, her
quiet radiance was the loudest thing in the room.” Recent commissioned choreographic projects include WAKE, for the L.A. Dance Project, which was selected for
performance at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar during the 2023 World Cup, and RESONANCE an interdisciplinary collaboration with the L.A. Dance Project, the Getty Museum PST ART: Art & Science Collide, Hollyhock House UNESCO World Heritage site and Los Angeles County Department of Art & Culture and City Parks – which bridged scientific research on empathy with choreographic practice and interdisciplinary dialogue to create dances, guide public talks, and mobilize
social action in a public park.

Ms. Johnson’s dance installation, ANALOGUE, for Rambert Dance, premiered in London in May 2024, and is her third collaboration with music composer David Poe. Analogue was lauded as "fabulous" by The Guardian and portraying a "collective sense of yearning" by The Stage, which also named Analogue one of the top five dance productions in the UK in 2024, and “mind blowing” by the UK’s Bachtrack, “…absolutely remarkable: an experience that exceeds expectations,
feels inclusive and leaves you wondering how on earth it was achieved…the best hour you will ever spend.”

Her current research focuses on sustainable economic frameworks for artists and arts organizations, as well as public policy for artists’ intellectual property in an increasingly complex digital and global environment. Ms. Johnson is a Senior Fellow at the Swiss Institute for Advanced Study, Collegium Helveticum, in Zurich and is based in Los Angeles.