Johanna Winters is an interdisciplinary artist whose work engages puppetry, performance, and film to confront embodied expressions of women’s pleasure and disappointment. At the center of this work is a puppet-protagonist who self-consciously performs her sensuality for the camera.
Johanna has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Lawrence Arts Center, Vermont Studio Center, the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University, and the Women’s Studio Workshop residency in Malmö, Sweden. She has exhibited and performed her work nationally and is a recipient of the Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Award (Kansas City, MO), and the Grant Wood Fellowship at the University of Iowa School of Art & Art History. In summer 2026, Winters will be an artist-in-residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.
At MacDowell, Winters completed a first draft of a new short experimental film—part of an ongoing series she began in 2021. Earlier works from this series have been screened at the Open Air Media Festival, the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. While in residence, Winters also shot new footage on the MacDowell grounds for use in an upcoming film project about longing.
