Welcome, friends.

I am Chaunesti Webb-Johnson, PhD. I am an Atlanta-based, interdisciplinary performance scholar, artist, and producer, born and raised in the US-South. 

 

As a scholar, I write about contemporary Black feminist avant-garde performance, risk, and difficulty.  Specifically, I think about how Black women use their bodies in performance to claim personal pleasure and reimagine identity and belonging. 

 

As an artist, I have over two decades of experience as a theater practitioner, working as an actor, director, and writer, a teaching artist and a voice over actor.  With an MFA in Theater and Contemporary, my performance training has focused on embodied and devised methodologies such as psychophysical acting techniques (Grotowski), extended voice techniques (Roy Hart), and Viewpoints.  Additionally, my performance practice is aesthetically and conceptually informed by improvisation. 

 

As a producer I make work that explores Black culture through experimental forms of expression - work that invites the observer to reimagine the world and themselves with the re-orienting model and energy of the avant-garde. Through projects like I Love My Hair, The Improviser's Playground, and the Black Creativity Lab, I produce embodied experiences for the artist and the audience that attempt to reorganize our personal and world perspectives at the smallest unit of identity and consciousness, the mind and body.