Stephen Johnson

Stephen Maxwell Johnson is an Australian filmmaker, best known for his films Yolngu Boy and High Ground (2020). He is also known for directing Yothu Yindi's music videos in the late 1980s to early 1990s.

Early life and education Johnson was born in England. His parents were teachers, who worked in several places around the world. He grew up in the Bahamas, Africa and the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia. His father became a senior teacher at Kormilda College, a secondary school for Aboriginal students in Darwin, and Johnson made friends with many of the students there.

He has spent most of his life in Arnhem Land, where he became friends with Witiyana Marika when quite young. He also learnt much about the history of the area from the Aboriginal perspective, which involved "chaos" and massacres of Indigenous people, although this was not taught at his school.

Johnson went to an acting school in London, where he also trained as a cameraman,

Career Johnson began his film and television career as a trainee cameraman at Channel 9. He also directed the feature-length documentary Tribal Voice (1993) (the name of Yothu Yindi's second album as well as a song of the same name), about close friend Mandawuy Yunupingu , singer/ songwriter with Yothu Yindi. and earned a score of 78% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

Johnson said that High Ground was 20 years in the making, The film is extremely close to his heart, a "passion project", as revealed in several interviews and the question-and-answer panel following a showing of the film at the National Film and Sound Archive in March 2021. and it earned eight AACTA Award nominations. Yolngu Boy and Johnson's direction of an episode of the children's TV drama Out There also earned AFI (the forerunner of AACTA) nominations. 1993 Stephen Johnson for "Djäpana (Sunset Dreaming)" by Yothu Yindi