Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. They are devoted to deviant forms of knowledge and doom as a liberatory condition. Their 2021 album, Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House was called "rawboned noise-blues" and "doom-ravaged," and summoned comparisons to Lingua Ignota, Jeff Buckley, and Keiji Haino. Bandcamp Daily called Hedva's trademark voice, "part Diamanda Galás, part Korean Pansori singing, part widow wailing at graveside, rising to a gigantic operatic swoop like a vulture arcing slowly in the sky." Their 2019 EP, The Sun and the Moon, had two of its tracks played on the moon. ArtReview called it “a black slurry of rich, harsh noise, industrial beats, and grainy samples. Like much of Hedva’s work, the album is a celebration of darkness, an evocation of the swampy zone where the sacred and profane meet.” 

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 Kirkus called a “hellraising, resplendent must read,” and the novel On Hell, which was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018. Their artwork has been shown internationally, most recently in the 2025 Seoul Mediacity Biennial, and their essay "Sick Woman Theory" has been translated into 11 languages.

Photo Credit

Designed and Directed by Sadia Quddus
Photographed by Sadia Quddus and Dougal Henken