Johnny Blazes (they/them) is an educator, performer, and creator whose work centers on co-creating a more liberated, more joyful world through the imaginative potential of art.

Johnny has written and directed over 20 full-length shows including original youth theater, touring circus productions, community circus productions, and cabaret-theater shows. They have worked with students from infancy through elderhood, in collaboration with organizations including: The Neighborhood School, Meridian Academy, Boston Latin School, Isis Maternity, The Theater Offensive, American Youth Circus Organization, The Boston Conservatory at Berklee, The East Side Institute, and more than a dozen universities and colleges across the USA.

As an educator, Johnny’s work integrates theater, music, and movement into the teaching of transformative social emotional learning, with a focus on conflict resolution, identity formation, and recognizing structures of privilege and oppression with pre-adolescents. They are passionate about giving young people the opportunity to learn more about how their own minds work, and develop their sense of identity and pride. They strive to create a more just world by teaching children of all neurotypes how to connect with each other with empathy, without privileging one way of communicating over another, and by building awareness of how power and marginalization affect all of us.

In the adult education space, Johnny’s work as a movement teacher focuses on creating spaces where every body is valued for its unique talents and ways of moving. After many years of learning, un-learning, and re-learning dance and circus technique with non-normative bodies at the center, Johnny’s classes are built for people who are plus-size/fat-identified, older, disabled, chronically ill, post partum, people of color, folks who are trans, queer, neurodivergent -- namely, people who have been told implicitly and explicitly that they don’t belong in movement and fitness spaces. With formal training in classical ballet, contact improvisation, contemporary dance, and many years of continuing education in everything from pelvic floor dysfunction, to hypermobility in dancers, to teaching circus to students with disabilities, Johnny’s teaching is constantly evolving in tandem with their own hunger to learn.

Johnny is currently pursuing a Master’s of Education in Arts, Community, and Education at Lesley University. Their published works are included in the anthologies Encounters with Contact and Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, and they can be seen performing with their collective dance company, Pluto Return.