Creative Collage: Filmmaker Kirsten Johnson Inspires MFA Students

Filmmaker and School of the Arts Artist-in-Residence Kirsten Johnson visited Emerson College last week, bringing with her an idea-generating class assignment.

The director of Emmy-winning Dick Johnson is Dead visited two classes of Visual & Media Arts Professor Associate Chair for Curriculum Marc Fields and VMA affiliated faculty member Jess Epstein March 3 through 6. She also participated in Q&A after a screening of her film. 

For the classroom assignment, Johnson devised a project using random photo books like Flowers of the World and Life: The 60s. Students took portraits of each other, then collaborated to make a profile of themselves via collaging. 

“It’s kind of a discovery of relationships and your own identity,” Fields said. “It involves a lot of immediate hands-on and creative work.”

Johnson came up with the project after teaching a course at Brown University about the creation of cinema. She said students often don’t have access to the “actual making” of film because of expenses, and ideas often stay in their heads. The idea of the used photo book goes against the concept of starting with a blank page, Johnson said, because everyone starts with their own experiences and stories. 

“We’re playing with how you build your own approach to your creative life, what are the ways you think about it, what are you actually doing, what fears do you encounter, and how you move through those,” Johnson said. “You encounter your fears really quickly.”

Johnson hoped that the project would help students inspire each other. 

“This uses elements of cinema —image, language, juxtaposition —and playing around with editing and making something for real,” Johnson said. 

After Monday’s class, Johnson assigned homework asking students to make a “clock of their lives.” Johnson made the instructions vague on purpose, and it showed in the diverse art brought by the students. For Ryan Bremer, MFA ’27, his clock had each hour representing the two years of his life leading up to his recent 25th birthday. 

“For most school assignments we’re told exactly what the instructor wants– 11-point font, Times New Roman, double-spaced –so giving the power of interpretation to the students was a powerful thing,” Bremer said. “I had no idea what I was going to do, until I got inspiration from a powerpoint slide in [Johnson]’s Tuesday talk. When I presented my clock in class, nobody else had the same interpretation as me. And that was OK.”

While Johnson talked, students sat in a circle on the floor, collaging and passing around their respective clocks. Each student got to share the story of their work, which Johnson said illustrated the foundations of cinema — images give clues, but context lends understanding.

“This is the way the artistic community works,” Johnson said to the class. “We steal ideas from each other, we copy each other until we can make something in our own voice.”

Along with generating inspiration, Johnson hoped the collaging exercise would help students navigate their fears. 

“The best piece of advice that I gathered from my time with Kirsten was how much shame impacts my life,” said student Thomas Brady, MFA ’26. “Being aware of the fear of failure is liberating. Find out what makes you feel uncomfortable and comfort it.”

According to Johnson, there are two types of ideas—execution-dependent and solid gold. In an execution-dependent idea, it matters how a project is made and produced. For a solid gold idea, the form and content are already one.

Johnson said her only solid gold idea was Dick Johnson is Dead, and she doesn’t think she will have another. She hoped the project would allow the students to use introspection to help generate their own solid-gold ideas. 

“The book is a starter kit,” Johnson said. “You’ve started, so don’t stop.”