Emma Johnson - CV [art]

 DEGREES

Master of Science, Michigan Technological University, Spring 2026

Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture

[work toward Ph.D. from 2022-2026, passed Qualifying Exams (QE) on March 24, 2025]

[QE areas: neoliberalism, visual culture, rhetorics of display]

Master of Arts, Central Michigan University, 2022

History

Bachelor of Arts, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, 2008

English

Bachelor of Fine Arts, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, 2005

Painting, Photography

ACADEMIC EXCHANGES

Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena, Germany, Spring 2022

• History, Sociology

[Erasmus+ grant recipient]

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, National Student Exchange, 2007-2008

• English, German, interactive design

Macalester College, Macalester Exchange Program, 2003

• Philosophy

Parsons Paris School of Art and Design, Study Abroad, Fall 2002

• Fine art, French

FELLOWSHIPS, SCHOLARSHIPS, & GRANTS

King-Chávez-Parks Future Faculty Fellowship, 2025-2027 ($21,389)

Graduate Research Assistant, IPEC, project advisor: Dr. Soonkwan Hong, 2025 ($1,000)

Michael Schoenecke Travel Grant for Graduate Students, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA), 2025 ($800)

Gary Burns Graduate Student Travel Grant, Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (MPCA/ACA), 2024 ($200)

IPEC Graduate Student Small Grant Award, Michigan Technological University, 2024 ($3,000)

American Association of University Women – Women in Transition Scholarship, 2021-2022 ($2,000)

European Union’s Erasmus Plus Exchange Program Grant (Central Michigan University, History Department, for

Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program grant (UROP), University of Minnesota, 2007 ($2,000)

PUBLICATIONS, ACADEMIC

Johnson, E. (2026). Book chapter. “Outlining Ideas Is a Writing Process Unworthy of Practice (that Students Should Outsource to AI) ✨ Learning to Write Involves Dissecting, Assembling, and Understanding Structure” in Bad Ideas About AI and Writing: Toward generative ideas for teaching, learning, and communication. C. Basgier, A. Mills, M. Olejnik, M. Rodak, and S. Sharma, eds. Perspectives on Writing Series , a collaboration between WAC Clearinghouse, University Press of Colorado, and Parlor Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2026.2777.2.28 Direct link to chapter: https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/books/bad/chapter28.pdf

Podcast version of Bad Ideas About AI and Writing hosted by Dr. Kyle Stedman on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033E57HAEV2o6OI1GVtCh4

Johnson, E. (2013). “Darkytown Rebellion Installation: Viewers become a Kara Walker live action film,” Voices from the Gaps, University of Minnesota, Online. http://web.archive.org/web/ 20141015204932/http://voices.cla.umn.edu/essays/essays/DarkytownRebellion.html

Johnson, E. (2013). “Kara Walker,” Voices from the Gaps, University of Minnesota, Online. http://web.archive.org/web/20150422015808/http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/karaWalker.html

SELECTED PRESENTATIONS

Johnson, E. (2025). “Coercive Algorithms: How asymmetries in power are revealed in Lauren Greenfield’s Social Studies.” Popular Culture Association. New Orleans, Louisiana. 16-19 Apr 2025. [Presenter]

Johnson, E. (2025). "Beauty, Excess, and the Grotesque in the Late-Capitalism Critique of Lauren Greenfield." Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Chicago, Illinois. 3-6 Apr 2025. [Presenter]

Johnson, E. (2023). “All Dressed Up With Everywhere To Go: Fashion as a reflection of identity in the Atlantic Anthropocene.” 10th International Conference on Language, Literature, and Culture. “Fashion As Material Culture.” Organized by Gümüşhane University, Ankara Science University, and University of Évora. Gümüşhane Üniversitesi, Turkey. 15-16 Sept 2023. (Virtual) [Presenter]

Johnson, E. (2022). “The French Concession as Contested Space: What aesthetics reveal about globalization in Xīntiāndi.” Arch Dalrymple III Department of History Graduate History Conference, University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi (Virtual). [Presenter]

Johnson, E. (2022). “Representations of War: How the Vietnam War shifted art from abstraction to (public) intervention.” History Graduate Student Association Conference, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA (Virtual). [Presenter]

Johnson, E. (2021). “Performing Nationality: What the 1773 Boston Tea Party reveals about American identity.” Arch Dalrymple III Department of History Graduate History Conference, University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi (Virtual). [Presenter]

Niester-Mika, J., Trabalka, A., Johnson, E., et al. (2015). "From Writing Center to WRIT: Adding Reading & Technology Services to Our Writing Center." International Writing Centers Association Conference, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. [Co-Presenter]

LANGUAGES

French, intermediate (Studied at Parsons Paris, Delta College, Michigan Tech, and self study)

German, fluent (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Language Proficiency Exam, 1/16/09)

SOLO ART EXHIBITIONS

• Neoliberal Loops, A-Space, Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA, 17 September - 6 November, 2026.
  Undergraduate classroom visits at MTU, September 17, 2026
  Artist talk on Neoliberal Loops: September 18, 2026

• What I Witnessed in Palestine/Israel, Creative 360, Midland, MI, 24 Jan 2018

• Emma Johnson: Idiosyncratic Memories & Projections, Creative 360, Midland, MI, 2012

• Untitled, College of Visual Arts Library, St. Paul, MN, 2005

• Drawings of my Hometown, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A., 2001

GROUP ART EXHIBITIONS

• Second Annual Keweenaw Youth for Climate Action Earth Week Art and Music Festival, Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA, 2023

• What’s Certain About Uncertainty, Midland Center for the Arts (traveling), Midland, MI, 2021

• #weareallonhiatus, Artists on Hiatus, (online) https://www.instagram.com/p/B_K2aykJsh7/ Instagram, 19 Apr 2020

• The Quarantine Chronicles, Saginaw Art Museum, (online) https://www.saginawartmuseum.org/quarantinechronicle/covid-19-message-on-the-sidewalk/ 18 Apr 2020

• The Art of the Circus, Creative 360, Midland, MI, 2018

• Art-i-facts: An Unconventional History of MCAD, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, 2011

• Chain Letter, Samsøn Projects, Boston, MA, 2011

• Memories & Projections Suggesting the Present, MCTV, 2011

• Micro2, microbo.net, Milano, Italy, 2010

• Alden B. Dow Museum of Science and Art Museum School STUDENT/FACULTY exhibition, Alden B. Dow Museum of Science and Art, Midland, Michigan, 2010

• What Matters Most? ecoartspace NYC Benefit Exhibition at Exit Art, New York, NY, 2010

• The Sketchbook Project, Art House Gallery, (traveling exhibition) Art House Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Laconia Gallery, Boston, MA; 303 Grand, Brooklyn, NY; Art and Shelter Gallery at The Salvation Army Alegria, Los Angeles, CA; Soulard Art Market, Saint Louis, MO; Home Gallery, Chicago, IL, 2010

• 5 x 10, Creative 360, Midland, Michigan, U.S.A., 2009

• Repaired Things, curated by Anne Percoco (online), 2009

• Wonders of the World, The Artists’ Market performance art project for Creative 360, Midland, Michigan, U.S.A., 2009

• Multiplex, The Soap Factory; Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A., 2005

• Member Spotlight, Minnesota Center for Photography, Minneapolis, MN, 2005

• Senior Show, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, 2005

• Painting 4, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, 2004

• Visible Beat, Minneapolis College of Art and Design/Sound Unseen, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A., 2004

• 16 mm Films, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A.

• The Art of Democracy: Tools of Persuasion, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A., 2004

• The Third Annual Poster Show, Minneapolis College of Art and Design/Students In Design, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A., 2004

• Box Fresh, (juried exhibition), The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A., 2004

• What I Did on my Summer Vacation, The Fallout Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A., 2004

• Anti-Fashion Fashion Show, Soo Visual Arts Center at The Fine Line Music Café, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A., 2003

• Carry on Drawing Group Show, curated by Avantika Bawa, (traveling exhibition) Aquaspace, Savannah, GA; Seventh Floor Gallery, Madison, WI; India Habitat Center, India; Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minneapolis, MN; Washington State University, Pullman, WA; Alternative spaces in the Badlands Glaciers; Jehangir Art Gallery, Boroda, India; ArtCore Gallery, Mumbai, India; Indian Habitat Center, New Delhi, India; Rapid Transit Gallery, Savannah, GA; Beguiling Gallery, Toronto, Canada; Student Art Gallery, University of California San Diego, 2002-05

• Junior Exhibition, Parsons Paris School of Design, Paris, France, 2002

• Painted, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, MCAD Main Gallery (juried exhibition), Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A., 2001

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

HASTAC Scholar, cohort 2025-2027

• Present at Digital Fridays and write blogs at the intersection of technology and the arts, humanities, and sciences. See profile: https://hastac.hcommons.org/members/emmacjohnson/blogs/

Northwestern University

• 2024 Rhetoric, Media, and Publics Summer Institute. “Media Aesthetics VI: Shared Grounds of Media Aesthetics and Ecology.” 15-19 July 2024. Evanston, IL.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

• Spent one week researching at LOC for the project “Monuments of the U.S.-Mexico Border: What art objects reveal about power in the borderlands” funded by the Institute for Policy, Ethics, and Culture (IPEC) at Michigan Technological University. Washington, D.C. 9-16 June 2024.

TEACHING

Graduate Student Instructor, Humanities, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, Fall 2022–Present

Instructor of Record unless otherwise indicated.

• Public Speaking (HU2830): Summer 2024 (Online), Spring 2025, Summer 2025 (Online), Fall 2025 (2 sections)

• Composition (UN1015): Spring 2023 (2 sections), Fall 2023 (2 sections), Spring 2024, Fall 2024 (2 sections)

• MonsterComp (UN1015): under Dr. Marika Seigel, Fall 2022

Additional teaching pedagogies taken:

• Digital Photography, Fall 2025

• Media, Fall 2024

Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of History, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI, Fall 2020

Teaching Assistant, 16 mm Production, Minneapolis College of Art & Design , Spring 2005

SERVICE & PUBLIC OUTREACH

Host, Art, Theory, & Praxis with Emma, YouTube, https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDGOy8wm3t3NG3uAGqsIBoOjguvfLwRt8&si=jOG91hrcuCIEeYO9 

Area Chair, Class Studies, Midwest Popular Culture Association/Midwest American Culture Association (MPCA/ACA), 2023-2024

Public speaker, See 1.5-hour presentation “What I Witnessed in Palestine/Israel” at Creative 360 in Midland, MI, broadcast 68 times on MCTV: https://youtu.be/LORWnYBWUO8 (2018)

ACTING

Actor, 2002-Present (including starring in MTV2/Buddy Lee episode)

MEMBERSHIPS

• Popular Culture Association, 2024–Present

• Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 2024–Present

Shake That Dirt Off Your Shoulder

I created a remix of Jay-Z's "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" (2003) from The Black Album

with Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off (Taylor's Version)" (2023/2014) from 1989 (Taylor’s Version).

I'm calling it "Shake That Dirt Off Your Shoulder."

https://youtu.be/SQ9AuKZ5B1A?si=mzTdgws1I2BCeeGA

Neoliberal Loops art show announcement

Exhibit:

https://events.mtu.edu/event/neoliberal-loops-rozsa-art-galleries

Reception:

https://events.mtu.edu/event/reception-for-neoliberal-loops-rozsa-art-galleries

Artist's Statement: Neoliberal Loops [soundtrack]

The soundtrack: The music is meant to be beautiful but, because it is based on the ugliness of financial precarity and a system that crashes approximately every fifteen years, there is a tension between aesthetic beauty and an ugly lived reality. I invite the audience to contemplate the normalization of financial crisis and the structures that uphold models that lead to financial insecurity/precarity.

There are three loops in the soundtrack Neoliberal Loops.

Loop #1: The whole duration of the 2008 Recession (2007-2009)

Loop #2: The U.S. government interventions with money, including bailing out AIG and two subsequent financial packages (9/16/08, 10/03/08, and 02/17/2009) Starting on each “event” day, another note is added to create a harmony on 9/16/08, a triad on 10/03/08, and a 7th on 2/17/09. The extra notes represent the money affecting the stock market so the harmonies continue for the rest of the musical composition.

Loop #3: The Occupy Wall Street encampment in NYC as a 59-day intervention (09/17/11-11/15/11) Musical discordance is overlaid over corresponding dates in 2008 to coincide with the occupation in 2011.

Neoliberal Loops Soundtrack (Remixed)

Neoliberal Loops REMIX TRACK pt1_Music 1637_1704-2008 [WINTER DREAMS]

43 min., 4 sec.

Neoliberal Loops REMIX TRACK pt2_Music 2009-2023_2026 [DIAMONDS AND CHERRY BLOSSOMS]

31 min., 8 sec.

9 to 5 Work B**ch

5 min., 22 sec.

Neoliberal Loops (Opening bell numbers for each day of the recession at 510bpm)

46 sec.

I remixed the Neoliberal Loops soundtrack with samples of music from classical music to pop music, including hip hop, in chronological order.

I was influenced by the American DJ Girl Talk who mixes pop and hip hop. His songs make me feel nostalgic. I wanted to create an experience of nostalgia and moving through time while linking the stock market to the soundtrack of everyday life.

I was also influenced by the Turkish producer and electronic music artist Venëris. Indeed, I included his “Vivaldi Winter Drill #2” in the “Neoliberal Loops” remix. He takes classical music and adds hip-hop bass to create pieces that stay true to the classical music but add contemporary elements. I see this as a way of viewing history in the present. We take what we know of the past but put a modern spin on it. Historians call it presentism, with a negative connotation implying that you are not being true to the times. An inaccuracy due to our inability to embody the minds of people of the past with different concerns and sensibilities. However, I think it’s unavoidable and it’s the way we understand the world around us. Additionally, classical music can feel really old and Venëris’s contemporary hip-hop elements make the old pieces feel fresh and modern. Instead of a beautiful antiquated piece of art that you admire and try to imagine the zeitgeist of the times, new life if breathed into the piece and you don’t have to imagine it. You can (literally) feel it.

The soundtrack starts with 1704’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” by Johann Sebastian Bach because it’s the earliest music I could find close to 1637 when the tulip bubble began. I wanted to connect these worlds running in parallel: life and commerce.

I divided this timeline into two parts: before and after 2008 to delineate between before and after the crash.

Additionally, by juxtaposing similar phenomena, e.g. the pursuit of money, in a short succession, I emphasize Western culture’s preoccupation with wealth.

Additional “Neoliberal Loops” remixes include the themes of rain, weather, work, money, and luxury goods. E.g. Blending Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” with Britney Spears’s “Work B**ch” sparks a dialogue between feminism and postfeminism in relation to work and capitalism.

– Emma C. Johnson, 2026

Works referenced

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002.

Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Translated by Siân Reynolds. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Row, 1972–76.

Godmilow, Jill. Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Snow, Michael, dir. Wavelength. 1967; New York: The Film-makers' Cooperative, 1967. 16mm film.

The Wall Street Journal.

Artist's Statement: Neoliberal Loops [Videos]

MIDI soundtrack, DJEJ, a.k.a. DJ Emma Johnson, “Neoliberal Loops,” Sound, 16min, 4sec., 2025-2026.

https://youtu.be/sFsX02Q-5bM

Video 1 (long durée) - “Stock Market Crashes 1637-2025”

Emma Johnson, “Neoliberal Loops,” Digital Video, 16min, 4sec. on a loop, 2025-2026.

https://youtu.be/AKi7xP3mr8E

Video 2 (medium durée) - “Perusing Zillow and Billionaires’ Row”

Emma Johnson, “Neoliberal Loops,” Digital Video, 32min, 8sec. on a loop, 2025-2026.

https://youtu.be/MKSFirJKqLo

Video 3 (short durée) - “Shopping and Waves by the Statue of Liberty”

Emma Johnson, “Neoliberal Loops,” Digital Video, 64min, 16sec. on a loop, 2025-2026.

https://youtu.be/huizJBq28V8

I was influenced by Seth Price’s 8-4 9-5 10-6 11-7 (2007) and I was influenced by Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud.

Neoliberal Loops is an attempt to materially (video/sound/space) conceptualize neoliberalism employing theories from history, film theory, and visual culture. Neoliberal Loops refers to the loops used in the musical composition, the videos playing on a loop, and the historical loops that we live in. These historical patterns (loops) are described by Braudel’s medium durée. They are exemplified in stock market crashes and events leading up to them on repeat (loops) every 15 years under neoliberal capitalism.

I collected the NYC stock market data from each day of The 2008 Great Recession (December 2007 through June 2009) from The Wall Street Journal and I set up parameters to translate the data into a musical composition. Composed in MIDI, the NASDAQ numbers correspond to musical notes to create a musical composition, with the pitch changing by one half-tone every 50 stock-market points on a musical scale ranging from C3 (middle C) to G5. Notes get lower as the stock market decreases. The music is in 4/4 time with each bar including the opening, high, low, and closing stock-market numbers, represented in four quarter notes. Rests in the music stand in for weekends and holidays when the stock-market trading floor is closed. The first and last notes of the measure can be different because there is a pre- (4am-9:30am) and post-trading market (4-8pm) outside of regular business hours, 9:30am-4pm EST. The musical piece is the duration of a work day on Wall Street.

The musical notes were derived from data charting the rise and fall of the stock market over three different durations: The entire crash, the bailout of AIG, the first and second U.S. bank government bailouts, and the duration of OWS’s occupation of Zuccotti Park in NYC

French historian Fernand Braudel coined the long durée, medium durée, and the short durée, or sea foam, in his work The Mediterranean and The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949). After WWII, Braudel led the Annales School of history which focused on social structures instead of isolated events. While there, he also formalized structures of economic cycles. In applying Braudel’s concepts to the 2007 Wall Street Crash, I invoke the idea that the crash was not an event but rather a societal structure in place that culminated in disaster rather than an unfortunate, isolated unforeseen anomaly. The three video projections each represent a duration (or durée) of time. Braudel’s three durées include:

1. Courte durée: short term, e.g., political shifts, bad harvests

2. Moyenne durée: medium term, e.g., trade cycles over decades to a century

3. Longue durée: long term, e.g., geographical and social changes that shift over centuries to millennia

I paired each durée conceptually with Nicolas Mirzoeff’s concept of Visuality 1, Visuality 2, and countervisuality, which Mirzoeff writes about in The Right to Look: A counterhistory of visuality (2011). Visuality 1 is visuality that supports the hegemonic state, Visuality 2 can be neutral, or Visuality 2 can include countervisuality which critiques the hegemonic state. The three videos comprising the Neoliberal Loops video installation include:

1. Long durée/ Visuality 2-countervisuality: Recession goods as economic indicators

2. Medium durée/ Visuality 2-neutral: video of a domestic space/home with someone looking at Zillow.com

3. Short durée/ Visuality 1-cultural hegemony: stock market numbers changing in real time

4. Alternate video: footage of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests among many protests throughout history

All of the imagery in the three videos fade into the sea, bringing it back to the concept of the Mediterranean, or bodies of water carrying connotations of permanence and exerting a strong force on history.

The music incorporates three layers that each draw on stock market data over a short, medium, and long durée.

Video 1: The collection of crashes in a condensed temporal space and placed together in succession illustrates that each crash is not an anomaly but, instead, part of a pattern that spans centuries, from the tulip speculation bubble in 1637 to the U.S. tariffs that caused a recession in 2025. By showing crashes in succession, the viewer experiences the temporality differently. In real life, lived in real time, people forget the last crash faded from public collective memory. However, it’s unforgettable and patterns are recognizable when shown together.

Video 2: Wavelength (1967), directed by Michael Snow, served as an inspiration for the visual aspect of this part of the video installation. Wavelength’s slow zoom into the photograph of waves in a body of water, as well as Braudel’s sea foam of the short durée, led to my choice to use water as imagery. Additionally, water has a cyclical relationship with time creating the motion of waves. I also appreciate the domestic setting of Snow’s film, the interior of an NYC apartment. Snow’s film is 45 minutes, but composed of 18 three-minute segments, because of the restriction that 16mm film could only be shot for 3 minutes maximum. At each three-minute mark in my video zooming in on the water at the feet on the Statue of Liberty, I superimposed an image of a commercial product often purchased during recessions, products that serve as indicators that a recession is coming. These products don’t seem like much individually and appear neutral. But together in succession they tell a story of financial precarity.

Video 3: Zillow.com is both domestic and private away from Jürgen Habbermas’s public sphere. It is also directly linked to the housing bubble because the domestic simultaneously is part of the real estate market. Additionally, many people like to peruse Zillow recreationally. That is, they have no intention of buying anything but use the platform for purposes of fantasy, such as imagining financial security. This phenomenon was even satirized by Saturday Night Live in 2021: https://youtu.be/yEfsaXDX0UQ?si=SILLp-3TTX39fRmY “The pleasure you once got from sex now comes from looking at other peoples’ houses,” one of the sketch’s characters explains. This links the private with the public in the form of houses as domestic space, global financial investment, as well as part of occupying an imaginary space of eroticized rags to riches from house flipping fantasies.