Jen Johnson is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the practices of meditation, writing, and photography. She is also a mindfulness teacher and licensed clinical mental health counselor. Jen’s writing and photographs are a contemporary inquiry into psychological space, place, memory, narrative, loss, and longing. Her dreamlike photographs explore the beauty and complexity of the search for home in an ever-changing world.
Jen makes art that unearths truths, offers healing and creates personal, social, and environmental change. She feels passionate about making meaning of experience through creating narratives that inspire empathetic action toward healing for people and the planet. Her images facilitate the telling of untold stories, speak the unspeakable, and bring to light those aspects of our Self that often remain hidden. Her work offers a collective voice, decreasing the sense of social isolation for those living within those stories that many people cannot bear to hear.
Jen’s creative work has been influenced most by the loss and beauty of her mother, and by birds, the ghost trees, and the work of Rachel Carson, Henry David Thoreau, Minor White, Virginia Woolf, Carole Maso, Terry Tempest Williams, Robert A. Johnson, Marion Woodman, and Buddhist teachings and practice.
Jen is a two time grant recipient from the North Carolina Humanities Council for her Invisible Wounds of War Project and a recipient of a grant from The Arts Council of Wilmington and New Hanover County for her Ghost Trees project. Jen’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and published on book and CD covers and in magazines. Her images are held in collections in corporate and academic settings and private collections. Jen earned an MFA in interdisciplinary Arts, MS in counseling, and MS in rehabilitation counseling. She is a fine art photographer, writer, mindfulness teacher, and counselor in North Carolina.
Jen likes to imagine a world in which each of us tells our stories in the interest of healing self, other and the Earth. Perhaps we could just heal this planet, one story at a time.