Yohana Junker

Yohana is an educator, artivist, and doctoral candidate who affirms art, imagination, and theological inquiry as belonging together. At ARC, Yohana works as a consultant on the ARC Studio initiative, a project whose goal it is to encourage collaboration among artists, people of faith, and scholars, making creative resources more accessible to communities across North America.

She received her BA from Universidade Metodista de São Paulo, in Social Communications, her MTS from Christian Theological Seminary in which she investigated aspects of spirituality, tragedy, and transcendence in the works of Georgia O'Keeffe and Mark Rothko. As an artivist, she sees her artwork as creating a space in which communities and individuals can come together to dialogue and confront our narratives. Her series Into Awareness has been exhibited in galleries such as the Earth House Collective, the Rotunda Gallery, and the Jewish Community Center in Indianapolis, the Thurder-Sky, Inc. in Ohio, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, in Evanston, among others.

Her most recent piece "Marielle Franco: Co-creating the Future with Our Ancestors," is exhibited at SOMarts Cultural Center in San Francisco to honor the life and legacy of the first black, lesbian, councilwoman elected in Brazil, who was murdered by the state in 2018. As an educator, Junker is committed to emancipatory pedagogies that make education and conscientization accessible to all. She is currently teaching the M.A. seminar "Imaging Resistance: Art, Religion, and Activism," through the Center for Art and Religion, at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She is a Presidential Scholar, a Louisville Institute Fellow, and a Hispanic Theological Initiative Dissertation Scholar who has lectured and published on art and religion. Her dissertation "Unsettling the Landscape," investigates how Land Arts of the American Southwest display theological vibrancy, colonial implications, indigenous knowledge, and subversive potential.