Rochelle Johnson (she/her) was born and raised in Denver, Colorado, where she developed her passion for drawing at an early age. As a child, she discovered the work of Lois Mailou Jones and Jacob Lawrence and was further inspired by the Denver Black Arts Festival in the 1980s. In 1989, Johnson enrolled at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, where she learned to create stories using oils and watercolors and received a B.A. in Illustration.

In 1992, Johnson moved to Seattle, where she worked as a freelance designer, creating community theater posters and identity packages for local businesses. These opportunities paid the bills, but she remained 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 and sold her first non-commercial piece.

In 1999, Johnson returned to Denver and eventually resumed pursuing the idea of storytelling 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, by Monica Frazier Anderson. Johnson’s work has been published in several journals, including American Art Collector Magazine. In addition to painting in her Denver studio, Johnson has recently taken on several curatorial projects. In 2017, she curated Inclusion: Diverse Voices of the Modern West at the McNichols Civic Center Building in Denver. She is currently curating The Search Within: Daughters of the Diaspora, which opens at the Western Colorado Center of the Art in Grand Junction in December 2018.