About
I'm an artist, professor, and mentor whose work explores attention, beauty, time, and our relationship to the living world.
Through photography, handmade paper, teaching, writing, and one-on-one mentorship, I create spaces where people can slow down long enough to notice what is already here.
For much of my life, I thought I was studying photography.
What I eventually realized was that photography was teaching me how to pay attention.
Standing beneath a dark cloth with a large-format camera, making handmade paper one sheet at a time, watching light move across a room, sitting quietly with a student or a mentoring client—the same questions kept returning.
What becomes visible when we slow down enough to see?
How does beauty change the way we inhabit the world?
What happens when we meet life with curiosity instead of certainty?
Over time, these questions became the center of both my artistic practice and my work with others.
My artwork often explores impermanence, memory, longing, grief, belonging, and our relationship to the natural world. Working across photography, handmade paper, installation, and collaborative projects, I am interested in how attention can transform an ordinary encounter into something meaningful.
As a professor, I help students cultivate ways of seeing that extend beyond photography and into their lives. Again and again, I witness how a shift in attention changes not only what we notice, but how we understand ourselves and one another.
As a mentor, I work with artists, writers, seekers, and people navigating moments of transition. Together we create space for reflection, creative clarity, and the often-overlooked wisdom that emerges when we stop forcing and begin listening.
Though these roles may appear different, they arise from the same source.
I believe attention is a form of relationship.
I believe beauty matters.
I believe that many of the things we are seeking become easier to recognize when we create space to encounter them.
My work, in all its forms, is an invitation into that encounter.
Thank you for being here.
Biography
Hillary Johnson is an internationally exhibited artist, educator, writer, and mentor whose work explores attention, beauty, time, impermanence, and our relationship to the living world. Working across photography, handmade paper, video, installation, and collaborative projects, her practice investigates how sustained attention can transform ordinary encounters into sites of meaning, reflection, and connection.
Rooted in photographic seeing while extending into material and contemplative practices, Johnson's work engages themes of grief, belonging, memory, landscape, embodiment, and the porous boundaries between self and world. Through images, objects, and participatory experiences, she explores the ways perception shapes our experience of ourselves, one another, and the environments we inhabit.
Johnson holds Master of Fine Arts degrees in both Photography and Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Purchase College, State University of New York. She is currently a Teaching Scholar in Photography at the University of Notre Dame.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in the United States, China, and Europe, and is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Museum of Science and Industry. She is the recipient of the Albert P. Weisman Award and the John Mulvany and Bob Thall Scholarship in Photography.