Johanna Householder was born in Alabama but left the US when Richard Nixon was elected for the second time. She has been making performances, video and other artwork in Canada since the late 1970s. Working at the intersection of popular and unpopular culture, she shapes plundered source material in order to talk back to mass forms.

As a member of the notorious feminist performance ensemble, The Clichettes in the 80s, she helped
re-establish lip sync as a viable medium for cultural critique. Householder has continued to practice her own brand of pop cultural détournement, often in collaboration with other artists, including her daughter Carmen. Her most recent performance works include a series of lectures- On the Subject of Art, based on a text by Alain Badiou, Performance Festivals redux, and Portrait of a Situation, which was performed in Helsinki, Valparaiso, Chile, Budapest, Bratislava and Cluj, Romania. Her video collaboration with BH Yael, Approximations 1- 3, has screened in numerous venues internationally. In 2010 she performed at Chaos in Belfast, N. Ireland, LiveAction Göteborg, Sweden, at Scandinavia House in NYC and in Guangzhou, China.

She is keenly interested in issues of embodiment, the histories of live art, and the effect that performance has had in contemporary art, new media, and social perception and she writes and lectures on these subjects. With Tanya Mars, she edited Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance by Canadian women, published by YYZ Books, Toronto in 2005. As an organizer and communitarian she helped to found Danceworks and the Women's Cultural Building in the 80s, and the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art in 1997. It held its 8th biennial festival in 2010. Her work is also represented in Prêt á Emporter / Take Out: Performance Recipes for Public Space, edited by Christine Redfern for La Centrale, Montréal, 2004 and in Jane Wark’s Radical Gestures: Feminism And Performance Art In North America, 2006.

Johanna Householder is a professor in the Integrated Media Program, Faculty of Art at OCAD University, where she is currently Chair of the Criticism and Curatorial Practice Program.

Artist Code: 919