Cath Johnson

Profession

International Academic Coordinator

Person Type

Staff

Biography

Cath is a senior academic at University of the Arts London and an International Academic Coordinator at London College of Communication. Cath is an artist, and educator based in London, UK.

Cath has many years experience as an art and design educator in London, leading creative community projects in a variety of environments and designing, developing and managing courses that enable students in the UK and overseas access art and design education.

In recent years Cath has delivered guest lectures and creative workshops in many countries, building relationships with creative organisations and sharing ways of teaching and learning to students preparing to study art, design, media and performance in the UK.

Cath holds a BA Graphic Design from Middlesex Polytechnic, London; a Postgraduate Certificate in Education with Art specialism from the Institute of Education, University of London; MA Printmaking from Camberwell College of Arts, UAL. Her dissertations explore India’s socio-political scene and related themes reflected in the work of Anita Desai, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and Salman Rushdie and the democracy and autonomy of Ravi Varma’s oleographs.

Cath has exhibited widely in the UK and active involvement in artist cooperative True Image Café in the 1980s, engaged with challenging the notion of the gallery and exploring alternative spaces.

Having visited art schools in Moscow and Leningrad in 1984, Cath returned 10 years later during Glasnost and Perestroika as British Representative for Art Kontakt Russia/UK - an independent, international group of thinkers and artists that signalled a creative optimism and international connectivity during changing times in Russia. Her work is held in Art Kontact Archives and Karelian Republic Art Museum.

As the millennium approached, Cath trained as an overland expedition leader for Exodus, passing her HGV licence and spending 3 years travelling overland from the UK across Europe, Middle East and Asia, leading and managing trips of up to 4 months duration, visiting the world’s most renowned cultural sites and driving through the remote wilderness of the Karakorum Highway, Khunjerab Pass and Xinjiang Province.

For Cath, this experience completes the circle and informed her practice that explores the temporary, the unfamiliar, nostalgia and forgetting.

On return Cath partnered with the group Hook and Eye, offering creative projects with imagination, purpose and value in community spaces encouraging active and collaborative learning. The 2 person show ‘Work’ housed in the Ecology Pavillion in Mile End London, received a grant from Local Network Fund and involved students from local schools and culminated in an exhibition of student work in a space normally closed to the public.

Cath is a writer member of Performing Right Society (PRS) 2004. She has worked on production and management of events with Martha Lewis and Cypriot Arts Forum and has written a number of published songs with Martha.

Cath has worked with Debbie Dickinson and Jazz Moves on events such as Women take Centre Stage, the London Jazz Festival and has tour and stage managed Martha and Eve aka Donna and Kebab on British Council tours of Syria and Cyprus.

More recently Cath has worked with composer, band leader and trumpeter Kevin G Davy, providing visuals on his Monster Jam night at Richmix. She has been singing with choir Hackney Voices for 10 years and has performed to her community many times including Helen Chadwick’s Dalston Songs and in Circa Contemporary Circus’s Depart, performed in Tower Hamlets Cemetary Park as part of London International Festival of Theatre.

Cath Johnson

Biography

London College of Communication

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