OVERFLOW RADIO to Premiere at Northrop This Fall

Emily Johnson / Catalyst's new multifaceted project, Overflow Radio, is a performance, skill-share, planting of 1,000 trees, and radio transmission taking place over 24 nonconsecutive hours within a massive quilt installation and across geographies and territories.

Overflow Radio – overflow, a name for what is possible – emerges from Emily Johnson's practice of creating large-scale social choreographies, and features contributions from Indigenous writers and scholars, performers, local community organizers, lo-fi radio wave artists, food futurists, and land rematriative activists. It provides a space to gather in person and over the radio in ways that transcend colonial borders, languages, and time; a place to practice shared commitment, gather what we need to know, and create actions that move into the world and support our better futures, together.

Overflow Radio, the performance, is housed within a quilt installation that has been part of a decade-long community sewing project. Designed by textile artist Maggie Thompson, the quilts feature hand-written messages and visions of hundreds of community co-creators. Across the duration of 24 nonconsecutive hours, audiences and performers will gather around radios, listening to live broadcasts of stories and text from twelve First Nations and Indigenous writers speaking from their home territories. Performers Emily Johnson, Brandi Norton, and Michelle Boulé will dance an otherwise score meant to shift our perception of time. Local community organizers will offer four skill-shares centered on making, body, land, protection, in possible forms of self-defense, seed saving, nervous-system regulation, power-tool use, and radio building. Each performance cycle includes a meal-sharing component developed in partnership with local food justice organizations. And outside, over an extended time, participants will plant and nurture 1,000 trees, creating a constellatory support network and ongoing care resource.

On September 2, 2026, from 12 to 4pm EST, Emily Johnson / Catalyst and collaborators will launch Overflow Radio Radio on the airwaves, a monthly four-hour micro-FM-radio broadcast and digital stream that mirrors the essence of the live performance with the embedded themes: making, body, land, protection. Working with the natural power of radio waves and guided by Producer Stina Thomas Hamlin, Overflow Radio Radio will feature contributions from Indigenous artists, thinkers, and makers. The September 2nd episode features Michelle Boulé offering a nervous system reset workshop; Misty Cook of the Stockbridge Munsee Community, speaking of plant relations and medicine; Emily Johnson sharing her work on the makings of the overflow; and IV Castellanos leading a skill share in relation to trees.

Overflow Radio will premiere at Northrop, University of Minnesota, October 9-12, 2026. More info at: https://www.northrop.umn.edu/events/emily-johnson-catalyst-overflow-radio-2026.

Following the Northrop performances, Emily Johnson / Catalyst, together with thought partners Brenda Child, Carly Bad Heart Bull, Kate Beane, Maggie Thompson, Mona Smith, and Diane Wilson, will convene A Gathering of Conversations on October 13 and 14. Held in Minneapolis at two sites—a bog northeast of the city and Owámnniyomni Okhódayapi, a Dakota-led land restoration, education, healing, and connection site and organization—the symposium will bring together artists, scholars, organizers, community members, and more-than-human kin for conversation, learning, and exchange inspired and developed by the themes and practices of Overflow Radio.

Constellation gatherings are a companion component of the Overflow Radio project with partner organizations creating locally rooted gatherings inspired by the themes and practices of Overflow Radio. The inaugural project, Overflow Radio: Šakotayišol Nunuš Constellation, will be presented by DiverseWorks in Houston, TX, from October 3 to 24. Developed in collaboration with Emily Johnson / Catalyst and local Indigenous and Native artists, the Houston program will include talks, skill-shares, listening gatherings of Overflow Radio, and an exhibition and performances by Aveda Adara, Chiara Beaumont, ChiChi, Karen Navarro, Aryn Ward, and Monica Villarreal, with additional participating artists and community partners. To kick-off the events on October 3, DiverseWorks will cohost a concert in collaboration with Good Medicine Music Festival 2026. More info at: diverseworks.org/event/overflow-radio-sakotayisol-nunus-constellation.

Additional engagements to be announced.

 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Emily Johnson (Artistic Director, Choreographer, Performer)

Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. Johnson belongs to the Yup'ik Nation, is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty, and well-being. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, United States Artists, Braiding Seeds, Forge Project, Center CIRCL Fellow, and recipient of a Doris Duke Artist Award, among others, Johnson is based in Lenapehoking / NYC. Since 1998, Johnson's large-scale performance gatherings insist thrivance, radical reworlding, and just futures. Her gatherings function as portals and care processions, engaging audienceship within and through space, time, environment—interacting with a place's architecture, peoples, histories and role in building futures. She is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.

Johnson's choreography and gatherings have been presented across what is currently called the United States, Canada, and Australia. Her current project, Overflow Radio, is a performance, skill-share, planting of 1,000 trees, and radio transmission taking place over 24 non-consecutive hours within a massive quilt installation and across geographies and territories. Her recent work, Being Future Being, premiered on Tongva Land in Los Angeles in 2022, and was presented at PICA's TBA Festival, Bates Dance Festival, Jacob's Pillow, New York Live Arts, and Festival TransAmériques, among others. Her large-scale project, Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars is an all-night exchange of stories, dance, ideas, food, and stars and sky that premiered in Lenapehoking (NYC) in 2017, and was presented in Zhigaagoong (Chicago) in 2019. Johnson choreographed the Santa Fe Opera production of Doctor Atomic, directed by Peter Sellars in 2018.

Johnson's lectures and writings have been published and commissioned by Art + Climate at DiverseWorks, Playwrights Canada Press, The Routledge Companion to Performance Art, The Open Society University Network's Center for Human Rights and the Arts, CEC Artslink, The Poetry Project, ArtsLink Australia, unMagazine, Dance Research Journal (University of Cambridge Press); SFMOMA; Transmotion Journal, University of Kent; Movement Research Journal; Pew Center for Arts and Heritage; and the compilation Imagined Theaters (Routledge), edited by Daniel Sack. She authored the Decolonization Rider (2020), a document that now serves as a foundation for structural change work in hundreds of cultural institutions across what is called the US.

Johnson hosts monthly fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Urban Cree scholar, Kai Recollet. She was the Pueblo Opera Cultural Council Diplomat at Santa Fe Opera from 2018 to 2020. She was a lead organizer of First Nations Dialogues, a member of Creative Time's inaugural Think Tank, a co-compiler of the documents, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and Notes for Equitable Funding. Johnson served as Social Practice Resident at the Kennedy Center for the Arts (2021-2022) and is a Social Practice Artist in Residence at Abrons Arts Center (2019-present). She is co-lead for First Nations Performing Arts.

Michelle Boulé, Contributing Performer

Michelle Boulé is a choreographer, performer, and mentor whose work bridges contemporary dance, healing, and transformational practice. Currently nomadic, she lived in New York City for 21 years and has performed, taught, and created work in over 25 countries. Her choreography has been presented by The Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project, ICA/Boston, River to River Festival, and The Met Breuer, among others. A Bessie Award-winning performer, she has collaborated extensively with Miguel Gutierrez, Bebe Miller, John Jasperse, and Deborah Hay. Her work has been supported by NYFA, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Bemis Center, and featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Dance Magazine, and on The Today Show. Across mediums, her work explores embodiment, devotion, and transformation.

Brandi Norton, Contributing Performer

Brandi Norton is an Iñupiaq curator and dancer based in Rhinebeck, NY. She works as curator of public programs at Bard College Center for Indigenous Studies, where she has commissioned original choreography and artwork and implemented collaborative support for Indigenous students. She holds a BFA in dance from the Juilliard School, and an M.S. Ed in early childhood education from Bank Street Graduate School. She works to bring Indigenous artists, educators, and thought leaders to Bard College for public-facing events. Before joining the Center for Indigenous Studies, she co-founded the dance company OtherShore, and was a dancer and teacher with the Trisha Brown Dance Company for nine seasons. Norton also had the privilege of being an elementary school teacher in New York City for eight years.

Korina Emmerich, Costume Designer and Set Consultant

Artist and designer Korina Emmerich founded the slow fashion brand EMME Studio in 2015. Her colorful work celebrates her paternal Indigenous heritage from The Puyallup tribe while aligning art and design with education. With a strong focus on social and climate justice, Emmerich's artwork strives to expose and dismantle systems of oppression in the fashion industry and challenge colonial ways of thinking. Emmerich has worked as a board member, special advisor and educator with The Slow Factory Foundation, a board member of The Fibers Fund, and she works as the Materials and Exhibitions Steward with Emily Johnson / Catalyst. In 2026 Emmerich was honored with The Pratt Institute Fashion Visionary Award. She is the co-founder of Relative Arts, a brick-and-mortar community space, open studio, and shop that showcases contemporary Indigenous fashion and design in NYC's East Village. Providing a peer-run space that fosters the advancement of Indigenous futurism through collaboration, celebration, and education. In 2025 she co-founded and stepped into the role of Executive Director for the inaugural Indigenous New York Fashion Week, launching runways for over 30 Indigenous designers, over 60 Indigenous models and produced programming of Indigenous excellence in music and art.

Maggie Thompson, Quilt Designer

Maggie Thompson is Fond du Lac Ojibwe and was born and raised in Minneapolis, MN. She received her BFA in Textiles at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2013. As a textile artist and designer, she derives her inspiration from family history, Ojibwe heritage and the broader Native American experience. Skillfully and intuitively working with both natural and synthetic materials, Thompson's multimedia artwork expands various textile traditions' inherited ways of being and becoming. Thompson had her first solo exhibition Where I Fit at All My Relations Gallery in Minneapolis in 2014, and was most recently included in the Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture in 2024 and the 2023 Renwick Invitational Sharing Honors and Burdens at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery. Recent solo exhibitions include Loves Me, Loves Me Not, Mardag Gallery, Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, MN (2023); Just Friends, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN (2022), and Dakobijige/ She Ties Things Together, Watermark Center, Bemidji, MN (2021). She has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions in Minnesota, including at the Plains Art Museum, Minnesota Textile Center, Walker Art Center, and Minneapolis Institute of Art. Thompson has been awarded grants and awards, including in 2023 the All My Relations and Bockley Gallery Jim Denomie Scholarship, Jerome Foundation Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, First Peoples Fund Seeding Cultural Treasures Grant, the Minnesota State Arts Board and Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. Her work is collected by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Minnesota Historical Society, North Dakota Museum of Art, Hood Museum, Tia Collection, and Field Museum, among others. In addition to her fine arts practice, Thompson runs a knitwear business known as Makwa Studio. She has also worked on curating special exhibits in Minnesota's Twin Cities, including at Two Rivers Gallery, the McKnight Foundation and the Minnesota Museum of American Art.

IV Castellanos, Interkinnector & Production Manager

IV Castellanos is a Mx Indigenous Bolivian/American, an abstract performance artist, sculptor, land defender and water protector in training. Their practice prioritizes skill sharing and creating space for Queer, Trans* and diasporic Indigenous communities and people of color. They create stand-alone sculptures, wall works installations, wearables, and objects for performance. Their studio practice involves a convergence of techniques to create sculptures that highlight labor and effort as meaningful actions. They received the Braiding Seeds Fellowship (2023), an IndieSpace grant (2023), a City Arts Corps grant (2021), and a Franklin Furnace Fund grant (2019). They are the co-director of Build And Reworld Now, in collaboration with choreographer/multidisciplinary artist Emily Johnson of the Yup'ik Nation, which is a space to make, rest, and reflect, situated on Haudenosaunee lands. Continuous projects include the Performance Art Delivery Service and editing books to the correct pronouns of the reader as ongoing forms of resistance and care.

Stina Thomas Hamlin, Radio Waves Producer

Stina Thomas Hamlin is a 6th-generation Texan of Indigenous and European descent and co-founder of State of Mind Media and co-director of 4th World Media. She is also a post-production supervisor and award-winning director of immersive media based in Lenapehoking. An early maker of Extended Reality (XR), her projects earned awards and funding from Samsung and Google as she broke ground in the field. Over the past 25 years, she has delivered hundreds of projects for film, television, and streaming platforms. She is most inspired when working with creative teams committed to justice, liberation, and care for the Earth.

OVERFLOW RADIO CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Dylan Robinson

Dylan Robinson is a xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) artist, curator, writer, and author who seeks to prioritize Indigenous resurgence through writing, curation, and inter-arts practice. He is the author of Hungry Listening: Resurgent Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).

Camille Georgeson-Usher

Camille Georgeson-Usher is a Coast Salish / Sahtu Dene / Scottish writer, artist, long-distance runner, scholar, and Audain Senior Curatorial Advisor on Indigenous Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Georgeson-Usher is interested in the many ways in which peoples move together through space, how public art becomes a site for gathering, and intimacies with the everyday from an Indigenous perspective.

Joseph M. Pierce

Joseph M. Pierce is a Cherokee Nation Citizen, Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University, and author of Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (Duke University Press, 2025).

Sonia Guiñansaca

Sonia Guiñansaca is a Kichwa-Kañari poet and cultural strategist. Their most recent poetry collection, Nostalgia Y Fronteras was published and translated in Spanish and Kichwa in 2023 with Severo Editorial.

Gwen Westerman

Gwen Westerman is a poet, visual artist, and scholar, an enrolled citizen of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Westerman is a Dakota language speaker, co-author of the book Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota, and has served as the Poet Laureate of Minnesota since 2021.

Diane Wilson

Diane Wilson is a writer, educator, and bog steward who has published six award-winning books and whose recent essays explore seed advocacy, food sovereignty, social justice, and cultural recovery. Wilson is enrolled on the Sicangu Oyate (Rosebud) reservation in South Dakota, and is a Mdewakanton descendent.

Eve Tuck

Eve Tuck's work is on collaborative Indigenous research, Indigenous feminisms, and land education. She is the James Weldon Johnson Professor of Indigenous Studies at Steinhardt and Gallatin, New York University, and the founding director of the new Provostial Center for Indigenous Studies at NYU, called the Center for Collaborative Indigenous Research with Communities and Lands (Center CIRCL). Tuck is Unangax̂ and is an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska.

Hala Alyan

Hala Alyan is the author of the novels Salt Houses and The Arsonists' City. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back. Her recently published memoir I'll Tell You When I'm Home is a finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize.

Joan Naviyuk Kane

Joan Naviyuk Kane is Iñupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary's Igloo), Alaska. Her most recent volume of poetry, with snow pouring southward past the window (2026) follows The Cormorant Hunter's Wife (2009), Hyperboreal (2013), The Straits (2015), Milk Black Carbon (2017), Sublingual (2018), A Few Lines in the Manifest (2018), Another Bright Departure (2019), Dark Traffic (2021), and Ex Machina (2023).

Kai Recollet

An urban Cree scholar/artist/and writer, Kai Recollet's work focuses on relationality and care as both an analytic and technology for Indigenous movement-based forms of inquiry within urban spaces. Recollet explores celestial land pedagogies as 'kinstillatory' in her work - expressing an understanding of land pedagogy that exceeds the terrestrial. Recollet co-writes with dance choreographers and artists engaged in other mediums to expand upon methodologies that consider land relationships and kinship making practices that are going to take us into the future.

Princess Daazhraii Johnson

Princess Daazhraii Johnson is Neets'aii Gwich'in and her family is from Arctic Village, Alaska. She is a Peabody Award-winning producer and writer and has multiple Emmy nominations. She is also a director and actor. She is known for her work on Molly of Denali (2019), True Detective (2014), Gath & K'iyh (2024), and Shaaghan Neekwaii (Two Old Women) (2025). Princess works alongside a large community of Indigenous creatives to defend the sacred and advance

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