Johanna Middleton (she/her) is an artist-educator-scholar with a passion for telling stories and organizing spaces for others to tell their own stories – particularly those that ask questions at the intersections of race and gender. She practices creating communities of care and collective healing, as well as brave spaces for dialogue across difference, through the process of sharing personal narrative. As an actress, Johanna has appeared on Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Nickelodeon, and as a storyteller, she has performed personal narrative on stages around Los Angeles including The Moth, KPCC’s Unheard LA, Upright Citizens Brigade, iO West, and the Santa Monica Playhouse. She is currently the co-host of Gray Area Stories, a podcast about the healing journeys of survivors of sexual violence and she recently staged the participatory performance, Resilient Body: a Ritual to Unlearn Rape Culture, devised in partnership with Louisiana State University student organizations committed to ending gendered violence.  In 2014, Johanna founded Girlie Stories, a storytelling community for womxn in Los Angeles, organizing gatherings, workshops, and showcases for six years. Also committed to arts education, she has worked as a teaching artist, program manager, and consultant for organizations like Albany Park Theatre Project (Chicago), Greenway Arts Alliance (Los Angeles), and The Colored Girls Museum (Philadelphia). In Los Angeles, Johanna co-created Arts Circle, a storytelling-based arts therapy initiative for students at Fairfax High School. She received her BA in Theatre at Northwestern and her MA in Communication Studies (Performance Studies focus) at LSU. Her research interests include applied storytelling, black feminisms, decolonial performance pedagogy, utopian performance spaces, critical ethnography, autoethnography, and autoperformance. Her scholarly work has been published in Storytelling, Self, and Society and Liminalities.