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Johanna Hedva

They // Them // Theirs

Writer, Artist, and Musician

Los Angeles, California

A black and white large-format film photograph of Johanna Hedva, a Korean American genderqueer person with long black hair. They are wearing a black leather jacket and have heavy black eyeliner on that makes their eyes look like holes. An apparition of their face smears across the frame, like a ghost on top of their body, an analog effect created by over-exposing the film.

Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber.

“My practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy, and political states of solidarity and disintegration.”

Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician from Los Angeles. Hedva is the author of the 2024 essay collection How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, which won the Amber Hollibaugh Award for LGBTQ Social Justice Writing. They are also the author of the novel Your Love Is Not Good, which was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize and which Kirkus called a “hellraising, resplendent must read.” Their first novel On Hell, was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018, and in 2020, they published Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of a decade’s worth of poems, performances, and essays. Their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House (2021) and The Sun and the Moon (2019). Their artwork has been shown internationally at Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the HAU Berlin, the 2025 Seoul Mediacity Biennial, the LA Architecture and Design Museum, The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Performance Space New York, the 14th Shanghai Biennial, MASS MoCA, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bolzano, and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich, among others; and in the Transmediale, Unsound, Rewire, Creamcake, and Creepy Teepee Festivals. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, Topical Cream, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016, has been translated into eleven languages. In 2024, Hedva was a Disability Futures Fellow.

Donor -Disability Futures is supported by Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation. The USA Fellowship was generously supported by donors of the USA Fellowship Awards program.

This artist page was last updated on: 01.14.2026

Interdisciplinary Writing
The cover of Hedva's book, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain Disability and Doom. The background color is a pale pink, with an engraving from a 18th century medical illustration entitled "The Rewards of Cruelty." It depicts a man being impaled with various medical devices, which look menacingly and even comically like torture instruments. The type of the title is a gray serif font. An arrangement of red stars overlays the image and text, forming the Chiron constellation.

How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain Disability and Doom by Johanna Hedva. Published by Hillman Grad Books, an imprint of Zando.

A color photograph of Hedva lying in bed depicted as a rage demon breathing fire. Vivid red and orange flames pour out of their mouth, which is outlined in black.

Johanna Hedva author photo for “Why It's Taking So Long”, an essay reflecting on six years of disability justice activism since their 2016 seminal essay “Sick Woman Theory” was published.

Photo by Pamila Payne.

“Why It's Taking So Long” (Excerpt)

The magic trick capitalism has managed to pull off is not only to make us believe that we do not need, but that we should not — and disability access is a long needle piercing the bubble of this magic trick. Without this magic, without this myth, we are left with the truth: The body is never going to be solvent; it’s always going to need too much, be too expensive, not do everything we want it to, hurt more than we can bear, and then deteriorate until it can no longer move. Disability access is about orienting time to a scale that prioritizes this truth, prioritizes what we need and whom we support, which is in direct opposition to the capitalist order of time that ignores and devalues such things… We’ve framed care within the context of debt — where my “giving” care to you means I’m depleting my own stash, and your “taking” from me means that now you owe me — and although we’ve made debt into an index of our deficiency, we’ve also made it the only possible condition of life under capitalism. To be alive in capitalism is by definition to live in debt, and yet we’ve defined debt not as a kind of radical interdependency, as the ontological mutuality of being alive together on this planet — which it is — but as all that reveals our worst, what happens when we fail, a moral flaw that ought to be temporary and expunged. By doing this, the omnipresence of our need is framed as a kind of weird bankruptcy that happens only to the weak — which is a fucking canard. Yes, it might be nice to labor without limits, survive without support, live without loss, decline, and fatigue, but that’s not how it is. If we should have learned anything from the COVID pandemic, it’s that, for better and most certainly for worse, we’re in this together."

Essay by Johanna Hedva.

A color photograph of the sculpture The Clock Is Always Wrong (Other Mouth), which is a mouthblown glass vial that resembles an alien skull. It is pierced with three large hooks bent by hand and piercing the top of the glass. It hangs from the ceiling by black chains, referencing hook suspension in BDSM. Inside is a sorcerous black goo that is concocted to drain for the rate of the exhibition, onto a black carpet. The image is bathed in a sickly yellow light.

The Clock Is Always Wrong (Other Mouth) by Johanna Hedva, 2024. Mouth-blown glass, three large hooks, chains, silicone oil mixed with pigment, carpet silicone oil mixed with pigment, carpet. The shape of the glass, the size of the two holes at its end, and the concoction of the goo have been calculated and made by hand, so that the rate the goo drains out of the glass will last the duration of the exhibition. Once it drains, it can never be used again. Included in solo exhibition Genital Discomfort, at TINA Gallery, London.