Paige Johnson

Paige Morgan Johnson is Assistant Professor of Performance & Race in the Department of Theatre. She received her PhD in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality from UC Berkeley.

Her current book project examines how transgender artists and publics in Indonesia utilize amateur aesthetic practices to articulate belonging in the wake of the Suharto regime and subsequent political reformation.

By attending to cross-medial performance practices and global queer genres, she traces how contemporary Waria—the Indonesian terminology for transgender women—circulate in national and transnational discourse to produce more nuanced understandings of the relationship between genres of performance and the legibility of gender. Her next project attends to localized understanding of race to explore the influence of Black aesthetics on performance practices in Southeast-Asia. This project interrogates how new media and global economic flows circulate and effect how Blackness is imagined and performed in the absence of embodied Black subjects. In addition to her academic work, Paige continues to perform and direct.