Jenny Olivia Johnson (b. 1978 in Santa Monica, CA) is a composer, sound artist, music scholar, and associate professor of musicology at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Her work ranges from essays on music, trauma, and synaesthesia to electroacoustic chamber songs, contemplative solo works, short amplified operas, and interactive, inter-media installations.

Her current large-scale project, “The After Time” (forthcoming in 2025), is a hand-painted 2D video game opera about ludic experiences of trauma, loss, and the queer erotics of grief in 1990s New York City. Her recent exhibition “DIVE (Lucy’s Last Dance),” a full-scale recreation of a dive bar, is an interactive installation based on “The After Time” that was exhibited at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in early 2020. Jenny’s music has been performed by such ensembles as New York City Opera, The Industry, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Wild Up, Ninth Planet, and the Asko Schoenberg Ensemble, among others, and her sound art has been exhibited at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (in collaboration with artist Daniela Rivera), and at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. Her first two albums, “Dont Look Back” and “Sylvia Songs,” were released on Innova Recordings in 2015 and 2018, and her academic work has been published in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness, Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, the Transcultural Music Review, and in a forthcoming colloquy on music and trauma in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Jenny currently teaches courses at UCLA on sound art, queer popular musics, creative and scholarly practices, music and trauma, and writing about music.