Deniz Johns                                                                                                                                          Artist Researcher                                                                                                                                                                                                     

(Note: website updates are in progress.)

Deniz Johns (she/they) is an artist, filmmaker and researcher. Her recent works investigate the radical political potential of aesthetic negation—through absence, abstraction, distortion, and deconstruction—as a means to subvert dominant visual cultures and foster radical spectatorship. She also writes on the politics of representation, especially concerning the oppressed, and the power dynamics between artwork and viewer in relation to race, gender identity, and agency. These inquiries contribute to emergent discourse in international artistic and research communities and have been published in English and French.

In 2012, Deniz co-founded collective-iz in London, with artists and filmmakers Maria Anastassiou, Amy Dickson, and Karolina Raczynski. Since then, collective-iz has programmed and produced significant experimental audio/visual events.

Deniz has been a full-time Lecturer at Lancaster University School of Arts since 2021, where she is part of the Interrogating Practices Research group.