Johanna Tesfaye is a Chicago-based creative practitioner and amateur archivist, with an obsession for sound, performance, and moving image. She is committed to working towards the health and social-wellbeing of BIPOC. Tesfaye’s artistic, professional work, and research focuses on ‘return’, collective memory, and memory performance as care.
Tesfaye is the recipient of the 2018 SAIC Belonging & Compassion Grant and was named a 2019 Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education Social Justice Scholar. She is currently pursuing her Masters in Art Therapy and Counseling at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Tesfaye also works as a Youth Leaders Training Cohort program co-lead and anti-oppression trainings curriculum builder & facilitator at the Chicago Freedom School. She is also serving as a board member on Ya’ll Rock Carbondale as part of the Girls Rock Camp Alliance, an international membership network of youth-centered arts and social justice organizations.