Tonika Lewis Johnson

Tonika Lewis Johnson is an American photographer, social practice artist, and community organizer based in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Her work focuses on the historical and contemporary effects of racial segregation, housing discrimination, and disinvestment in Black communities, using photography, mapping, public art, and participatory projects.

Johnson is best known for The Folded Map Project, a multi-year initiative that examines residential segregation in Chicago by documenting properties with identical street addresses located in racially and socioeconomically different neighborhoods on the city’s North and South sides. Johnson has developed related projects including Inequity For Sale, UnBlocked Englewood, and Belonging. She is a co-founder of the Englewood Arts Collective and the Resident Association of Greater Englewood.

Johnson has received national recognition for her work, including being named a Chicago Magazine Chicagoan of the Year in 2017, an Architect Magazine Gamechanger in 2021, and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2025.

Early life and education Johnson was raised as an only child in an artistic household; her mother was a writer, her father practiced photography, and several members of her extended family were visual artists. She grew up in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, where her maternal grandmother had lived since the 1960s. She lived in Englewood until the age of seven, when her mother moved the family to the Uptown neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side; they later returned to Englewood when Johnson was eleven.

Throughout her childhood, she attended schools on the city’s North Side, including Lane Technical High School, a selective-enrollment public school. Her daily commute between Englewood and the North Side contributed to her awareness of racial and economic inequalities across Chicago neighborhoods. While in high school, Johnson began pursuing photography and participated in Young Chicago Authors. She went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in journalism from Columbia College Chicago in 2003. She later completed an MBA at National Louis University in 2005.

Career After graduating from college, Johnson worked as a grant writer for nonprofit and social service organizations.

Johnson’s photographic work gained broader recognition after it was described as art by viewers online. Her work increasingly combined photography with public engagement and public presentation. In 2019, she was appointed to the Cultural Advisory Council for the City of Chicago.

Major works

The Folded Map Project

First exhibited in 2018, The Folded Map Project is a multi-media project examining Chicago’s residential segregation using the city’s street grid. Johnson photographs properties with the same street address located miles apart in racially and socioeconomically different neighborhoods on Chicago’s North and South sides and brings the property owners—whom she refers to as “map twins”—together for recorded conversations reflecting on their lived experiences.

The project includes documentary photography, facilitated meetings, recorded conversations, a short film, and an educational curriculum. In 2020, The Folded Map Project was organized as a nonprofit organization, with Johnson serving as chief executive officer.

Inequity For Sale

In 2021, Johnson developed Inequity For Sale, a public art and research project documenting the effects of mid-20th-century discriminatory land sale contracts imposed on Black homebuyers in Greater Englewood. The project installed life-size markers on South Side homes to share the history of contract selling and expanded to include documentary photography, oral histories, interviews with residents and descendants, and a podcast.

UnBlocked Englewood

Johnson launched UnBlocked Englewood in 2023 in partnership with the Chicago Bungalow Association. The initiative focuses on a single residential block in Englewood and seeks to “[reimagine] home improvement and neighborhood revitalization as public art.”

Initially centered on 22 homes, the project had repaired more than half of the participating properties by 2025, supported in part by a grant from the City of Chicago.

Belonging (Chicago)

Belonging (Chicago) is a photographic and audio project examining how race, class, and place shape young people’s experiences of inclusion and exclusion in urban environments. The project features portraits and recorded interviews with Black and Latinx youth reflecting on experiences of misperception, surveillance, and belonging within the city.

Belonging: France

Johnson expanded this inquiry internationally through Belonging: France, a continuation of the project documenting experiences of belonging and exclusion in Paris and its surrounding suburbs, including Clichy-sous-Bois. The project situates Chicago’s patterns of segregation within a broader global context.

Don’t Go

Johnson is the co-author, with sociologist Maria Krysan, of Don’t Go: Stories of Segregation and How to Disrupt It (2025), which examines residential segregation in Chicago through narratives addressing long-standing warnings to avoid the city’s South and West Side neighborhoods.

Other work

Johnson’s photography was the centerpiece of Englewood Rising, a resident-led billboard campaign conceived with community activists and funded by Englewood residents. The campaign used large-scale public imagery to counter narratives of poverty and crime by highlighting the neighborhood’s cultural and visual landscape.

Awards and recognition 2025: MacArthur Genius Fellow 2025: Visiting Pritzker Fellow, University of Chicago 2025: Social Justice Impact Hero, American Red Cross 2024: Fellow, Gordon Parks Foundation 2023: Community Impact Award, Metropolitan Planning Council 2022: Influencer, Landmarks Illinois 2022: City of Chicago's Together We Heal Creative Placemaking Grant 2021: Gamechanger, Architect Magazine 2021: Artist-As-Instigator Residency, National Public Housing Museum 2020: Corlis Benefideo Award, North American Cartographic Information Society 2020: Planning Advocate Award, American Planning Association 2019: Leaders for a New Chicago Award, Field Foundation 2017: Chicagoan of the Year, Chicago Magazine

Selected exhibitions The Long Dream, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (Fall 2020) Envisioning Justice Exhibition, Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Summer 2019) Folded Map, Loyola University Museum of Art (Summer 2018) Everyday Englewood, Loyola University Museum of Art (Spring 2018) From the INside, Harold Washington Library (April - June 2017) Chicago: Places, People & Possibilities, Chicago Cultural Center (Feb - April 2017)

Works

Personal life Johnson lives in Englewood, Chicago. She has two children.