JoHannah James was born in Jesup, Georgia (yes, that’s Jesus with a P) and spent the rest of her adolescence in rural Blackshear, Georgia, where her large, close-knit southern family has lived for generations. An incredibly shy child, she spent her childhood immersed in books and movies as well as her own imagination.

 

She tried everything under the Georgia sun–teeball, dance, pageants, singing, basketball, soccer, flag twirling, crochet, radio announcing, gaming, karate, talking to ghosts, and much more–but theater is the only thing that has truly stuck around. Upon graduating high school, JoHannah moved to New York City to study Drama at NYU’s Tisch School of The Arts. 

 

JoHannah has always been a fan of the eclectic. Scarcely a week goes by where you can’t find her at a flea market searching for overlooked treasures, scavenging bookstores, watching a slasher, rollerskating (poorly), or trying to pick up a new art-based craft She searches for herself in the stories of those who came before, whether that be through her ancestral family tree, or through the old photographs she collects at flea markets that date back to the 1850s.

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She is also a voracious writer who experiments in almost every medium, including playwriting and screenwriting. She recently finished her first full length play Dirt, a southern gothic adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone, the first production of which debuted Off-Off-Broadway in NYC in March 2024.