E. Patrick Johnson

Born Elondust Patrick Johnson on March 1, 1967, the youngest of seven children in Hickory, North Carolina, Johnson was raised by his mother, Sarah M. Johnson, a factory worker. They grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in Ridgeview, a majority-Black section of Hickory. Though she had only acquired a 10th grade education herself, his mother emphasized schooling and nurtured Johnson's creative talents early on and entered him in community talent shows. His first grade teacher, Beverly "Bunny" White, was instrumental in nurturing his creative and academic talents as well, by providing access to spaces that were closed to blacks and by providing financial support. He was also mentored by black women in the Ridgeview Community, including Z. Ann Hoyle, who became the first black alderman of Hickory's city council. Hoyle would eventually spearhead a resolution to honor Johnson with his own day in 1996. He attended Hickory High School, where he was Senior Class President, and later the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. At UNC-Chapel Hill, he was involved with a number of campus groups, including the Black Student Movement and the gospel choir. He entered college as a theater major, but after becoming a work-study student in the Speech Communications department, he switched his major. It was in that department that he was introduced to performance studies, oral history, and performance ethnography and influenced by his teachers and mentors D. Soyini Madison, Della Pollock, and Trudier Harris.

Johnson received both his bachelor and master's degrees from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in Speech Communications before completing his PhD in Speech Communications at Louisiana State University with certificates in English and Anthropology.

After earning his PhD, Johnson became an Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College. In 2000, Johnson joined the faculty of the Department of Performance Studies Department at Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor before receiving tenure and a joint appointment in African-American Studies in 2003. From 2003–2006 and 2014–2016, Johnson served as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Performance Studies. Later, he would also serve as the Chair of Performance Studies from 2006–2011. Johnson was promoted to Full Professor of African-American Studies and Performance Studies in 2007 before becoming the Carlos Montezuma Professor of African-American Studies and Performance Studies in 2011. He currently serves as the Chair of the African-American Studies Department.

Johnson's introduction of "quare" as a theoretical concept became particularly influential in the fields of queer theory, women, gender and sexuality and black studies. Originally published in Text & Performance Quarterly, "Quare' Studies Or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned From My Grandmother" went on to be reprinted numerous times. "Quare" signaled a significant departure from the lack of engagement with race and class by queer theorists and with gender and sexuality among black studies scholars.

Conceptually, "Quare" took seriously the lived experiences and knowledge of black queer people and such an understanding necessitated a shift toward enabling black queer people to articulate their own identities, knowledge and experiences. Further, the manner in which Johnson wrote the article blurs the line between art and scholarship as the article employs prose, poetry and theoretical ideas simultaneously. In 2000, Johnson convened the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference which served as the beginning of black queer studies as a field.

Johnson's first book, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity, examines how blackness is appropriated and performed—toward widely divergent ends—both within and outside African American culture and won the Lilla A. Heston Award and the Errol Hill Award.

His second book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (2008) is an ethnographic oral history of the lives of black gay men in the US South, a traditionally uninterrogated region. This book got the Stonewall Book Award from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association.

Published in 2005 with Mae G. Henderson, Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology interrogates the experiences of black queer people whose subjectivities, beliefs, struggles, triumphs and desires had not previously been interrogated by either Queer Theory or Black Studies. The anthology includes writings from scholars including Cathy Cohen, Kara Keeling, Roderick Ferguson, Rinaldo Walcott and Dwight McBride.

Published in 2014 with Ramon H. Rivera-Servera, solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews and essays is a collection of writings that feature seven solo performances by emerging and established feminist performance artists from the past three decades. The book received an Honorable Mention for the Errol Hill Book Award.

In 2013, Johnson published Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis, an edited collection of essays written by Dwight Conquergood. Conquergood selected Johnson to publish his work before his death in 2004. Conquergood was an ethnographer in the field of performance studies whose ethnographic methods focused on power, privilege and researcher reflexivity/responsibility.

Published in 2016, No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies features the next generation of black queer theorists who follow in the lineage of writings in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. The text was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and features writings by Amber Jamilla Musser, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, Jafari Sinclaire Allen, Lyndon Gill and Marlon M. Bailey.

Published in 2016, Blacktino Queer Performance (with Ramon H. Rivera-Servera) is a collection of nine performance scripts by established and emerging black and Latina/o queer playwrights and performance artists. Each script is accompanied by an interview and critical essay by scholars across a range of interdisciplinary fields.

Black. Queer. Southern. Women—An Oral History is a forthcoming text examining the experiences of black women who love other women and live in the US South. In this text, Johnson employed similar methods (ethnographic oral history) as he did in Sweet Tea.

Johnson has served on tenure and promotion evaluations, completed administrative service for Northwestern and served as an associate editor for publications including Text & Performance Quarterly, Sexualities, Cultural Studies and Gay & Lesbian Quarterly.

He is a member of several professional organizations including American Society for Theatre Research, American Studies Association, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Cultural Studies Association, Mid America Theater Association, Modern Language Association, National Communication Association.

Johnson has also served as convener for academic conferences including Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference, Black Feminist Performance, Creative Ethnography and Black Arts International: Temporalities and Territories.

In 1996 the Hickory City Council honored Johnson with his own day, citing his accomplishments as the first African American born and raised in Hickory to earn a PhD. In 2015, Johnson received the Oscar Brockett Award for Outstanding Teaching from the Association of Theatres in Higher Education. In 2010, Johnson was inducted into the Chicago Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Hall of Fame "for his leadership in the African-American LGBT community."[12]

Johnson resides in Chicago with his partner Stephen J. Lewis, an Emmy Award-winning producer and manager in television and radio news.

• Faculty bio at Northwestern University