Amber Johnson is a Professor, Associate Provost, and Executive Director and co-founder of the Institute for Healing Justice and Equity at Saint Louis University. As a scholar, artist and activist, Johnson’s research and activism focus on narratives of identity, protest, and social justice in digital media, popular media, and everyday lived experiences. As a polymath, their mixed-media artistry involves working with metals, recycled and reclaimed goods, photography, poetry, percussion, and paint to interrogate systems of oppression.

Dr. Johnson is also the creator of The Justice Fleet ™, a mobile social justice museum that fosters healing through art, dialogue, pleasure, and play. The museum currently houses three exhibits, Radical Forgiveness, Radical Imagination, and Transfuturism, an art activism exhibit that projects Black trans and gender nonconforming people as super heroes in an effort to render visible the embodied heroic work of dismantling the gender binary. Dr. Johnson’s forthcoming book, A Great Inheritance, uses memoir to highlight healthy forms of love and support for trans and non-binary folks alongside young adult fiction to speculate on gender futurity as a site of liberation.