KATE JOHNSON (1969-2020) Artist/Hyphenate: An Evening of Screenings, and Live Performance

March 27, 2025, marks the fifth anniversary of the passing of artist, educator, preservationist and thinker Kate Johnson (1969–2020). 

Digital art has a long history and comes in many flavors. Some, such as Johnson, have chosen to integrate the techniques and tools from both traditional, analog and even physical art, along with the more fluid and dynamic capabilities of the digital vernacular. A writer, director, photographer, musician and performer, she had the heart and soul of an artist along with the mind and hands of an engineer. She could write computer code, fabricate objects and inspire all those around her to do their best and always strive further upwards.

Sometimes artists are not recognized for their greatness until they have departed. Now that digital art is becoming more widely appreciated, there are those who came before, and whose efforts are worth remembering. Kate Johnson was nowhere near among the first digital artists. But some believe that she may ultimately be seen as among the most significant.

In 2021, the City of Santa Monica, where Johnson’s EZTV studio ( eztvmuseum.com)  has been located at 18th Street Arts Center since 2000, created an annual Fellowship Grant in her honor, "The Kate Johnson Digital Arts Fellowship." 

Kate Johnson was a hyphenate. An Emmy-award winning filmmaker, and she created some of the region's largest-scaled digital projections. She worked in both expressionistic and poetic visual art works as well as informative documentaries, always bridging the two with a blending of her unique visual vocabulary with the best-practices of established film iconography. She was also a writer/performer, creating evocative performance pieces that combined her various media into performance art experiences.