A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
SAIC faculty member Camille Casemier Johnson.

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Camille Casemier Johnson

Lecturer

Contact

Bio

Camille Casemier (she/her) is an artist and educator whose practice spans performance, objects, and material research. She holds a dual bachelor’s degree in Fine Art and Theater from the University of Michigan, studied dance at The New School, and received a Master of Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Early work with Bread and Puppet Theater shaped her attention to gesture and the political agency of objects. Her ongoing research is supported by her work at Mt. Sinai Resale Shop in Chicago, where she engages ephemera as both appraiser and content creator, exploring material culture in everyday circulation.

Awards

The Field Museum Department of North American Anthropology Artist in Residence with Selena Kearney, Chicago, 2025–2026; Hong Art Museum The Plan of Going Home Residency, Wenzhou, China, 2025

Exhibitions

Solo Exhibition: Almost Heaven, Trinity College, Palos Heights, IL 2024.

Group Exhibitions: Don’t Make Photographs, Think Them, Chicago Cluster Project, Chicago, IL, 2025.

Performances: Amenities, Foreign & Domestic, New York, NY; A Nap by the Jelly Troupe, Hong Art Museum, Wenzhou, China; Performance Mixtape #2, Watershed Art and Ecology, Chicago, IL, 2025; Media Live, Ypsilanti Independent Film Festival, Ypsi, 2025; Performance Mixtape #1, Watershed Art and Ecology, Chicago, IL, 2024; Quicker than a Ray of Light Then Gone, Public Space One, Iowa City, 2024; Elastro Series, Elastic Arts, Chicago, IL, 2024; Arte Accione, Faro Cosmos Festival, Mexico City, MX, 2023; Dance to Anything, Black Mountain College: Re-Happening, Lake Eden, NC, 2022; Performative Drawing Forum, Jawir Space, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2022. 

Personal Statement

I create interdisciplinary performances, texts, and images that conspire with and against the materials and ideologies we inherit. Drawing on methods from performance studies and essayistic cinema, I choreograph associative encounters between the archival and the embodied, the discarded and the intimate. While my day job involves producing explanatory media about secondhand goods, my artistic practice resists resolution—favoring opacity, failure, and the minor as generative modes. I’m interested in how storytelling can exceed narration: how seeing liveness in all things and instinctual enactment can function as forms of knowing and unknowing.

I work from a table that is 120 years older than me, where a woman wrote letters to her granddaughter of her pride and her troubles, imploring her to join the DAR. As she aged she stopped hearing the typewriter bell ding at the end of the line and her sentences fell off the page unfinished. My grandmother past these letters from her grandmother down to me and when I sit at this table I do not aim to finish any sentences but perhaps to pick up these dangling lines and to cherish instances of legacies come unfixed. 

Porfolio

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This course looks at the role of the observer and the performer through drawing and performance. Both practices respond to each other by mapping movement and moving mappings. We explore performance through drawing as a description, a medium, and a score for an embodied gesture. We use drawing to imagine movement and to move concepts, in which lines can act as tracing and foreseeing. Performances become descriptions and embodied marks and vice versa. We will look at performance art, presence practice, being seen and remarking on what will remain unseen, scores, methods of performance documentation and notation, as well as drawing as an embodied mark making and thinking process. We will look at artists like Francis Alÿs, Lygia Pape, The Gutai Group, Valie Export, Remy Charlip, Amy Sillman, among many other artists at the intersection of drawing as a performance practice like Janine Antoni, David Hammons, Stanley Brown, Raven Chacon, Joan Jonas; Artists in conversations such as Paul Chan and Martha Rosler, John Divola and William Camargo, Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson. We will work through texts like Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness by Hendrik Folkerts, Walkaround Time: Dance and Drawing in the Twentieth Century by Cornelia H. Butler, The Aesthetics of the Performative by Erika Fischer Lichte, Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, and How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch. Working in and with public space as surface, students should expect to blur the lines between traditional and non-traditional drawings and performances. All formats will be approachable, self determined, nothing more or less than walking if you so choose.

Class Number

2260

Credits

3

Description

The course looks at the role of the observer and the performer through drawing and performance. Both practices respond to each other by mapping movement and moving mappings. We will be exploring performance through drawing: drawing as a description, a medium, and a score for an embodied gesture. We will use drawing to imagine movement and to move concepts, in which drawing can act as tracing and foreseeing. Performances become descriptions and embodied drawings and vice versa.
We will look at performance art, presence practice, being seen and remarking on what will remain unseen, scores, methods of performance documentation and notation, as well as drawing as mark making and thinking process. We will look at artists like Sol Lewitt, Lygia Pape, Monica Baer, among other artists at the intersection of drawing as a performance practice like Janine Antoni, David Hammons, Stanley Brown; Artists in conversations such as Paul Chan and Martha Rosler, Devin T. Mays and David Schutter, John Baldessari and Paul Thek, Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson. We will work through texts like Walkaround Time: Dance and Drawing in the Twentieth Century by Cornelia H. Butler, Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene by Donna Haraway, and
'White Elephant Art vs Termite Art' by Manny Farber.
Working in and with public space as surface, students should expect to create traditional and non-traditional drawings and performances, blurring the line of traditional drawing material and embodied practice. Performance will be approachable, self determined, nothing more or less than walking if you so choose. Students will produce a final show at No Nation.

Class Number

2256

Credits

3