V&PA’s Jan Johnson wins Fulbright

jjohnson-photoV&PA Adjunct Professor Jan Johnson was selected for a 2015-2016 Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant. As a Fulbright Scholar, she will be researching “On Stitching in Scotland: Stories and Schemes of a Gendered Material Practice,” while teaching and working on a new body of embroideries at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee. As part of her research, Johnson will investigate the heritage of embroidery unique to Scotland.

Born in North Carolina, Jan Johnson was educated at Wake Forest University, later earning her Post-Baccalaureate in Drawing and Painting from Brandeis University and an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her one and two-person exhibitions of needlework drawings, prints and collage include the recent “The Eyes Go Blind” at the Sarah Doyle Gallery at Brown University, and “I Did Not Provide the Cup” at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn. She recently sewed a willing audience together in a performance for the panel, “Sewing is Writing is Body is Sewing” at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Conference at Naropa University. She received a Painting Fellowship from the Rhode Island School of Design to study and paint in Rome, and was selected as a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Drawing in 2010. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts – Lowell, and at Clark, where she also manages the Printmaking studio. Johnson lives with her daughter in a renovated textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts.