Born in 1980 in Warendorf, Germany, Johanna moved to Hamburg after her high school diploma in 1999 to get professional training in Illustration Design at Bildkunst Akademie, Hamburg. She finished with a degree in 2002 but felt the need to deepen and expand her artistic skills and applied for Design Studies at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaft, Hamburg (HAW). She graduated with a diploma in Design in 2007 with a strong focus on painting.

After short employment in a gallery and a publishing company restoring old comics, she was heavily missing the practice of painting and creating and decided to move back to the rural area she grew up in and pursue her path as a painter.

The idea of “time” and everything that is linked to that emotionally, such as memory, transience, and the brevity of a moment, drives her need to paint. Time is abstract and therefore tricky to paint, but when connected to our experience and memory, it is filled with sentiment and emotion. When painting, Johanna reflects on those narratives of time and memory and tries to depict „a sense of time“ on canvas.