Poet, writer, television producer.
Johanna Featherstone arrived in Australia in 1984 from England, where she was born to Australian and English parents. In 2001, she began producing and presenting the Red Room Radio Show, and in 2003 later established The Red Room Company as a vehicle for promoting Australian poetry and poets through new and unusual mediums.
Featherstone's poetry has featured in journals such as Quadrant, and the Best Australian Poems. In 2006, while a research associate at the University of Western Sydney, she created a series of literary television programmes called The Wordshed. The series was produced as a partnership between The Red Room Company, the university's Writing and Research Society, Sydney community television station TVS, and Heat magazine.
As an honorary associate with The University of Sydney's School of Letters, Art and Media, Featherstone was awarded the St James Ethics Center Vincent Fairfax Fellowship (2007-2009). Her firs collection, the chapbook Felt, was released by Vagabond Press in 2010. In 2011, she gave a TEDx talk on Transformation by Poetry in Sydney. In 2018, she collaborated with Sydney-based artist Jacqueline Rose on the public art project Abuzz (drawings and collages by Rose, text by Featherstone).
Since 2010, Featherstone has been one of the primary facilitators of the Red Room Company's Unlocked project, which works with inmates in correctional facilities across New South Wales, producing anthologies of their poetry.
