Martha B. Johnson

Martha B. Johnson is a stage director, dramaturg, and playwright, who is a co-founder and Core Artist at Full Circle Theater. She’s directed 40+ theater productions over her career in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul), and is a longtime collaborator with Full Circle Co-Artistic Director Rick Shiomi, both at Full Circle and at Theater Mu, where she was a co-founder and served as a Core Artist Group member for 21 years.

At Full Circle she has directed ANTIGONICK, GLASS & LADY M., and served as assistant director for FC’s acclaimed production of CAUGHT at the Guthrie Theater’s Dowling Studio directed by Rick Shiomi. She provided the original vision and staging concept for FC’s 2017 production, ​365 DAYS/365 PLAYS ​by Suzan-Lori Parks: A 2017 Remix, at Penumbra Theater, and directed 16 of the 46 short plays selected. At Theater Mu, she developed and directed several plays including THE HAND THAT HOLDS THE STRING, LAND OF A MILLION ELEPHANTS, GRACE, and TRIANGLES. She’s also directed at New Native Theater (STOLEN GENERATION).

She was co-writer, dramaturg, and assistant director for FC’s 2015 premiere production THEATER: A SACRED PASSAGE. In fall 2019 her play ​DIPPED IN LOVE​ was co-produced by Full Circle and Theater KinderSpace in Tokyo, with a Japanese translation by Momoko Tanno.

She began her Twin Cities career in the early 1980s as co-founder/co-artistic director of 21st Street Players, a small, experimental theater company, where she collaborated on new works by renowned poet Robert Bly and acclaimed Japanese Noh master Akira Matsui.

She holds a Ph.D. in theater from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she specialized in ancient Greek, traditional Japanese, and experimental European theater. She was a director, teaching artist, and professor at Augsburg University from 1988 to 2014.