Jenny Olivia Johnson composes music that ranges from compressed 20-minute operas to epic pop songs to highly abstract religious masses. Her work is deeply influenced by minimalism, noise rock, 80's pop songs, and vernacular television, and she also draws a great deal of inspiration from her academic work on synaesthesia, childhood trauma, and acoustic memory--an interdisciplinary project that recently earned her the New York University Dean's Dissertation Fellowship for 2008-09.

Jenny has collaborated with such artsists and ensembles as ICE, Alarm Will Sound, the Asko|Schoenberg Ensemble, Ensemble Robot, Bang on a Can, the Arditti Quartet, orkest de ereprijs, Voices of Change, the Young Peope's Chorus of New York City, composer and singer Corey Dargel, organist Maxine Thevenot, flutist Janet McKay, and New York City Opera, who performed two of her short operas ("The Endings" and "Leaving Santa Monica") at their VOX Contemporary Opera festivals in 2006 and 2007. She has also been honored with an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award (2006), two CAP grants from the American Music Center, and the 2004 Prix de Composition from the Conservatoire Americain de Fontainebleau, France. Jenny has held artist residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (2005, 2008) and the Banff Centre for the Arts (2008), and was most recently a finalist for the 2008 Gaudeamus Prize in Amsterdam, where her chamber opera "Leaving Santa Monica" was given its European premiere by Asko|Schoenberg at the Muziekgebouw aan't IJ in September 2008.

Currently a Ph.D. candidate in music composition and theory at New York University, Jenny also holds a Masters in composition from Manhattan School of Music and a BA in music from Barnard College at Columbia University. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.