Sarah Anne Johnson was born in 1976 in Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. She earned a BFA from the University of Manitoba in 2002 and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2004. In her first major work, Tree Planting (2002–05), which was also her thesis project, Johnson documented the communal replenishing of the deforested areas of Manitoba that took place over the course of three summers. In the final installation, Johnson juxtaposed photographs of the actual participants with photographs of dolls, which she constructed out of polymer clay and set in dioramas in her studio. Her installation therefore unveils to the viewer a photographic record not only of the events themselves, but also of the artist's own nostalgic reconstructions of past experiences. Johnson applied the same strategy to her work The Galapagos Project (2005), again capturing both her experience and subsequent memory of participation in socially and environmentally responsible tourism. For this project, she also introduced black-and-white photography into her practice, integrating yet another nuanced form of documentary evidence into her installations. The photographic portraits and landscapes that comprise In the Forest (2006) extend the approach the artist devised in her earlier two projects. Johnson's body of work since completing In the Forest engages with the relationship between photography and memory. Johnson's ongoing project, House on Fire, centers on the artist's memory of her grandmother, who underwent brutal experimental treatment for depression and passed away over fifteen years prior to the project's initiation. Using found family photographs, Johnson creates surreal monochromatic sculptures of her grandmother for this series, an incomplete version of which was exhibited at Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2009. Solo exhibitions of Johnson's work have been organized by the John Hope Franklin Center Gallery for Interdisciplinary & International Studies at Duke University (2005), Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg (2006), and Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (2009). Her work has also been included in group exhibitions such as J'en Reve at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris (2005), the Montreal Biennale (2007), and Guggenheim Collection: 1940s to Now at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (2007). Among her numerous grants and honors, Johnson was awarded the Granger Prize from the Art Gallery of Ontario/Aeroplan in Toronto in 2008. The artist lives and works in Winnipeg.