A conversation with Dr. Quanda Johnson
Quanda Johnson’s personal and professional journey resists a single definition. “I am a collage,” she says simply. “I am collaging my life together.” When she speaks, her language pulses with memory. Her work, a layered and textured experience inspired by the likes of Romare Bearden, Coco Fusco, and Bill T. Jones, is no different. An African American Studies Ph.D. minor alumna, she is an artist, scholar, performer, and visionary.
“My mom was the first artist in my life,” she shares. “She taught me how to color within the lines, and if I colored outside them, to have a reason in doing so.” She reflects on the power of legacy, using the collage medium as both a metaphor and a tangible fabric of her being. We sit in the Theater and Drama library on the sixth floor of Vilas Hall, where she has just finished office hours for her class “Fundamentals of Acting” (Theater 250).
“If asked when I was four years old what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered ‘an artist’,” she recalls. “But becoming an artist was not a career option.” Quanda’s mother was both an artist and an entrepreneur, owning her own brick and mortar beauty salon, Vernetta’s House of Beauty, when she was only seventeen. Her father, a former member of the Philadelphia Black Panther Party with multiple graduate degrees, introduced her to Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Nikki Giovanni at a young age. “He’d have me and some neighborhood kids march around the dining room table with our fists upraised chanting,” she remembers. “Good, better, best…never let it rest until your good is better and your better best.”
Quanda entered college on a chemical engineering scholarship, having excelled in math and science in high school. She recalls being told that artists could not make a living: “So you did something else.” That “something else” meant fitting herself into a mold that didn’t quite suit her. It was only after her mother’s death shortly after her undergraduate graduation that she remembered something her mom had said to her at fifteen. When asked to make a behavioral change, Quanda refused with “I can’t do that.” In response, her mother said: “No, you won’t do it. You can, but you won’t. You can—because you’re an actor.” At the time, Quanda felt offended, interpreting it as an accusation of being disingenuous. In the wake of her mother’s death, these words returned to her not as criticism, but as recognition.
That memory opened the door to performance. Helping a mentor in an art class led to assisting with a high school production; it was there that she was encouraged to audition for Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre School. Accepted into their master class, she found herself studying acting in earnest. “I was curious,” she says. That curiosity led to training in New York, a career in performance, and ultimately, a return to the artistic life her younger self had longed for.
Quanda has just finished her role in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, a University Theater production directed by Baron Kelly. In the August Wilson play, she portrayed Bertha Holly. Johnson’s process, rooted in improvisation and acting as a conveyor of awareness, truth, witness, and empathy reflects her commitment to the integrity of the playwright’s language. “If I stay true to the language, then the soul of the playwright comes through, no matter what choices are made in staging or direction,” she shares. “I start with the text, but I don’t start by rote memorization. I discover my intention when the text reveals itself through behavior.”
There is a quiet moment in the play that Quanda calls a “capsule” of the entire piece. She says “Mattie Campbell ties a ribbon in Zonia’s, Harold Loomis’s daughter’s hair. She says, ‘This ribbon has a color to it, like your dress.’ It’s such a small moment, but it holds beauty, longing, loss, nurturing, color, fragility, strength, and determination. It holds the historical essence of Black folk. That’s August Wilson.”
Off stage, Quanda’s academic and creative work explores Black ontology across the Atlantic world, from throughout Latin America to the Caribbean to Ghana to Nova Scotia to the United Kingdom. Central to her research is Black beingness and the “collage experience” of the African diaspora. “We are of African descent, but we are not solely African,” she says. “We came through a vortex of water, a birth canal called the Atlantic Ocean in the hulls of slave ships, and emerged as something new.” Quanda combines visual art, oral history, movement, and performance in her work and her life to unearth voices: “We are a new thing: there’s no one like us in the world.”
Quanda will soon explore Black Britishness and performative identity through a postdoctoral fellowship at Durham University in northeast England with Dr. Henghameh Saroukhani as her advisor. She plans to conduct ethnographic interviews and create a public theatrical concert blending voices, movement, and visual collage. It is this type of research that informs one of her performances, years in the making, I Know My Robe Gonna Fit Me Well, I Tried It On at the Gates of Hell—Speak! Our Mothers. It is a theatrical work built from the voices of fourteen enslaved African women throughout Atlantic modernity from French and British Canada to the U.S., the Caribbean, and throughout Latin America. Drawn from the archives, trial transcripts, and torture records, each monologue is a resurrection: a collage of words, silences, and breath. Her dream is to bring this show to Broadway. “These women aren’t just the mothers of Black folk,” Quanda shares. “They are the mothers of this entire hemisphere.”