About

Rochelle Johnson was born and raised in Denver, Colorado, where she discovered her passion for drawing early. As a child, she found the work of Lois Mailou Jones and Jacob Lawrence and was further inspired by the Denver Black Arts Festival in the 1980s. Meeting the artists and seeing their work ignited her passion for the Arts. In 1989, Johnson enrolled at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, where she learned to create stories using oils and watercolors. She attained a degree in Illustration. 

In 1992, she moved to Seattle, Washington, where she worked as a freelance designer, creating community theater posters and identity packages for local businesses. These opportunities paid the bills, but she became intrigued by the idea of being a storyteller through her work. In 1997, she entered the annual Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle Minority Art Exhibition, where she sold her first non-commercial piece.

In 1999, Johnson returned to Denver and eventually resumed pursuing the idea of story-telling through painting, a calling that had never left her consciousness. In 2005, her artwork was featured on the cover of the novel When a Sistah’s Fed Up, previously on Essence’s Top Ten List. Rochelle has been published in several journals. Today, Johnson continues to develop her unique story-telling style through painting from her Denver studio, which has added to her accomplishments as a curator. In 2017, she curated Inclusion: Diverse Voices of the Modern West at the McNichols Civic Center Building in Denver, Colorado, and in December 2018, The Search Within: Daughters of the Diaspora at the Western Colorado Center of the Art in Grand Junction, Colorado. Johnson is currently a graduate candidate at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.