Whitney Johnson uses sound to explore relationships between bodies and minds. She composes, performs, records, and installs multi-channel sound from the viola, sine waves, Max/MSP, organ, synthesizers, vocalization, tape looping, and field recording. Her latest recordings, Hav/Stena (2024, Drag City) adopt alter egos to approach sonic material from two sides, following the cult of Hermaphroditus through Cyprus and Greece and her own symbolic and biological ancestry in Sweden. Recent performance-installations have considered the effects of sound on the body. FIAT (2023, Forecast Platform Berlin), The Tuning of the Elements (2023, Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago), Huizkol (2020, Lampo), and Fundamental 256 Hz (2019, Longform Editions) each consider the possibility of brainwave entrainment, an alternative healing technique using binaural beats to induce relaxed or energized mental states. In tandem with her sound practice, she received her doctorate in the sociology of sound from the University of Chicago in 2018 and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship on sound and technology in the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University in Sweden in 2022. She began as Assistant Professor of Sound Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in August 2024.