Kiersten Johnson at the Burwell-Morgan Mill, March 2026
Kiersten
Johnson
Scholar  ·  Editor  ·  Filmmaker  ·  Writer  ·  Researcher

My education took the long way round — St. John's College, where I read the Greeks; undergraduate study in religious studies and rhetoric; graduate work in rhetoric and film at UC Berkeley; years studying and teaching in Denmark, Italy, and France; pilgrimages to sacred sites in India and Peru. I have always been drawn to the places where the visible world grows thin — where history leaves its residue in documents and images, where myth and philosophy illuminate what daylight alone cannot see. Every path led somewhere unexpected. All of them led here.

I work between the archive and the page, the editing desk and the film set, the library and the field — always, in some form, asking how ideas find their shape and how stories find their form.

I am also the daughter of a painter.

Work

Red Thread Editorial
Academic editing and archival research services for scholars and productions worldwide
Fermented Media
Documentary film and television — production, development, and the work in progress
Fermented Media Foundation
Media authorship training and professionalization workshops for underserved communities
Fata Falena Films
Toward a Cinema of the Ecstatic — stories that live at the edge of what film can hold
In development

Collections

Cathy Lindgren
The paintings of Cathy Lindgren
Coming soon
Film Stills & Fine Art Photography
Photography from the set and the field
Coming soon