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for the Spirit Pleasure is Sweet

Karma is a member of the first generation of her family born out of Mississippi.Improvisation and Synaesthesia guide Karma Mayet Johnson's performance work. In July 2007 Karma presented Indigo, a story of love between two black women who liberate themselves from slavery in 1863 Virginia. MTV’s 2008 Celebrate Black History PSA featured Karma’s solo vocal performance. She is a lead vocalist on the forthcoming album The Mercy Suite, a collaboration between poet Yusef Komunyakaa and composer Tomas Doncker. Collaborators have included film-maker Michelle Parkerson, composer/bassist Meshell Ndegeocello, performance artist Lil MonstaH, and the late guerilla theater innovator Rebecca Rice of D.C.’s Living Stage Theater Company. As an actor/singer/dancer, Karma joined Jane Comfort and Company’s production of Carl Hancock Rux’s Asphalt for a national tour (2000-2004) including runs at Joyce Theater in New York and Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival. In 2007 she had the honor of working with Bernice Johnson Reagon, Toshi Reagon, and Robert Wilson as a cast member of The Temptation of St. Anthony at the Melbourne International Arts Festival in Australia and Teatro Arcimboldi, Milan. Karma is an alumna of the Cave Canem Workshop-Retreat for African American poets and holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University. She teaches Creative Writing at Rutgers University. Her poems have appeared in Black Renaissance Noir, exit the apple.com, Nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, Cave Canem’s Gathering Ground, Redbone Press’ Voices Rising, and elsewhere. Karma’s work has been presented in diverse settings including D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, and NYC’s Dance New Amsterdam and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She resides in Brooklyn, New York with her boa constrictor, Krishna, who has been known to sit in on occasion at shows.