Biography

Kashi Johnson, MFA, is a Full Professor of Theatre at Lehigh University, teaching acting, African American theatre, performance, and Hip Hop Theatre pedagogy. A director, scholar, and nationally recognized innovator in culturally grounded actor training, Johnson has spent over 25 years creating spaces where students find their voices, examine identity and power, and bring their lived cultural experiences to the stage.

Raised in Southside Jamaica, Queens, during the emergence of Hip Hop culture, Johnson’s practice is grounded in storytelling, rhythm, resistance, innovation, and truth-telling. While traditional acting approaches focus on becoming someone else, her Hip Hop Theatre pedagogy helps students become more fully themselves—centering self-knowledge, cultural memory, and embodied experience as essential sources of artistic knowledge. Initially entering Lehigh to study computer science, Johnson discovered acting and redirected her life’s trajectory. She earned her BA in Theatre from Lehigh, her MFA in Acting from the University of Pittsburgh, and returned to join the Lehigh faculty in 1999.

At the center of Johnson’s work is Act Like You Know, the groundbreaking Hip Hop Theatre course she created at Lehigh in 2007. Blending acting, spoken word, movement, music, and cultural analysis, the course has generated over a dozen original public productions—including its 10th-anniversary performance and Act Like You Know 12.0: The Final Film. She also founded and produced the INTER(PLAY) Hip Hop Symposium, bridging campus and community through performances and workshops.

Johnson gravitates toward works wrestling with race, family, power, autonomy, and freedom across classic drama, Black theatre, contemporary satire, musicals, and devised performance. Her directing credits include Flyin’ West, The Piano Lesson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Little Foxes, Trouble in Mind, The Crucible, God of Carnage, Clybourne Park, Smart People, The Colored Museum, and Into the Woods (co-directed), among others. Devised plays include Untold Truths, Speaking Freely, Act Like You Know: 10 Year Show, Seen & Heard, and Open Up!, as well as staged readings of Gloria Naylor's Candy and M’Dear.

An Artistic Associate with the Black Acting Methods Studio, Johnson teaches Hip Hop acting techniques and advances culturally grounded training. Her published scholarship includes chapters in Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches and The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance. Featured on TEDx, Blackademics TV, Digital Theatre+, and CUNY's Segal Theatre Center, her TEDx talk, “Words to Live By,” centers her core philosophy: "Find your voice. Speak your truth. Change your life."

As Lehigh’s first Black academic department chair (2019–2026), Johnson guided the Department of Theatre through the pandemic, expanded culturally responsive performance, and broadened university-wide arts access. Notable awards and honors include the Christian and Mary Lindback Award, Donald B. and Dorothy L. Stabler Award, Class of ’61 Professorship, Deming Lewis Award, MLK Faculty Award, and selection as the 2026 Lehigh University Mace Bearer.