About | Johanna Kepler

Johanna Kepler

Johanna Kepler is a choreographer and creative director with a passion for storytelling through movement. She graduated from the University of Michigan (Class of 2020) with a BFA in Dance and a minor in Latino Studies, and is expected to graduate from Duke University in 2026 with an MFA in Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis and a Certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Her work as a choreographer, designer, and visual artist is centered around community building, cultural storytelling, and empowering artists at all stages of their careers.

During her time at Michigan, Kepler founded the student organization Arts in Color, dedicated to uplifting artists of color and fostering inclusive creative spaces. She received an Arts Award from the North Campus Deans in 2018, was selected for the UMS 21st Century Artist Internship, and in 2019 her choreography was chosen to represent the University of Michigan at the American College Dance Festival. She was also a student speaker for the School of Music, Theatre & Dance Class of 2020.

In March 2020, Kepler founded The Power of the Performing Arts, a global oral history project in which she interviewed over 300 professional artists worldwide on the impact of the pandemic, generating a platform that reached over one million viewers. Building on this work, she is launching a podcast, Creativity Cost (2025), exploring the financial, emotional, and social realities of sustaining a creative life.

As a dancer and choreographer, Kepler has worked professionally in New York City, Boston, and Durham. She spent three years at American Ballet Theatre (2020–2023), working in Marketing and as Executive Assistant to the Executive Director. Her choreographic work spans stage and interdisciplinary performance, including work presented at the Boston Center for the Arts with Bosoma Dance Company (2022), choreography for Duke University’s November Dances (2024–2025), and her MFA thesis projects: Weaving Dreams, a full-length interdisciplinary performance, and Woven Between Worlds, an immersive exhibition featuring a living archive of over 100 oral histories.

Her research and creative practice are grounded in an original methodology she developed called weaving, which integrates movement, visual art, and writing to explore cultural memory, identity, and hybridity. This work is deeply informed by ethnographic research in Guatemala, where she has worked with Maya weaving communities to understand how knowledge and identity are transmitted through embodied practice.

As a designer and creative director, Kepler co-founded Digital Drip Fashion House, producing a digital fashion event at Art Basel Miami in 2022 in partnership with Artisant and Spatial. The work was featured in Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, Coinbase, and Nasdaq, positioning Digital Drip at the forefront of digital fashion and creative technology.

Research & Methodology

Johanna Kepler’s research centers on choreography as a form of embodied knowledge production, investigating how movement practices transmit cultural memory, identity, and lived experience across time and place. Situated within performance studies, dance ethnography, and practice-as-research methodologies, her work positions the body as a living archive that holds, reorganizes, and transmits personal, collective, and ancestral histories through movement, intuition, and creative process. Central to her research is a methodology she has developed called weaving, an interdisciplinary practice that integrates movement, drawing, reflective writing, and ethnographic inquiry to explore how identities and memories are interlaced across geographies and generations. Informed by ethnographic research in Guatemala and partnerships with Maya weaving communities, her work examines how embodied cultural practices function as systems of storytelling, resistance, and knowledge transmission. This research extends into interdisciplinary performance, immersive installations, and public scholarship, including large-scale choreographic works and a living archive of oral histories. Across all platforms, she approaches performance as both an artistic and research-driven practice that invites audiences into embodied explorations of belonging, displacement, resilience, and transformation, while contributing to decolonial and interdisciplinary approaches within contemporary dance and performance studies.