Celia Johnson was born in Webster Groves, Missouri and studied at the California College of the Arts, the Duesseldorf Kunstakademie, and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where she completed her graduate studies. She has been an adjunct professor at Maryland Institute College of Art.

"Johnson creates paintings with a collage sensibility which are informed by an ongoing investigation into the effects of color and form in various states of movement, proximity and collision.
This interest has manifested as a non-referential, rhythmic, geometric abstraction possessing a dynamic, haptic quality, as if one could reach in and shift or rearrange the layers within the frame. The resulting image is a freeze frame of a kinetic procedure. Her work is the continuation of a utopian fascination with color-as-form that began in her childhood, and which continued to inspire through her discovery of the revelatory work of the Russian avant-garde, the De Stijl group, the Bauhaus, and the Polish constructivists Strzemiński & Kobro."

Celia Johnson has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in museums and galleries since 2010 including the Cameron Art Museum (North Carolina), the North Carolina Museum of Art (North Carolina) GreenHill Center for NC Art (North Carolina), ParisCONCRET (France), Boecker Contemporary (Germany), The Painting Center (New York), The Curator Gallery (New York), and Giampietro Gallery, (Connecticut), among others. She is the recipient of residency fellowships from The Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation. A 30 piece installation of her work is in the permanent collection of Credit Suisse. She lives and works in the dense woodlands just south of Chapel Hill, NC.