YOHAN SOL

aka Johann R. Montozzi-Wood

performance-maker | singer-songwriter | director | earthling

“…Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art…”

- Walter Savage Landor’s Poem, “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher”

Storyteller. Nature Lover. Wisdom-seeker. A little queer. Yohan Sol is an interdisciplinary artist making theater, music, performances, and other curious things. Kansas-born, Mississippi-raised, and now making a home in Durham, North Carolina, where the Eno River winds through the Eastern Piedmont, Yohan is drawn to the stories we inherit, the ones we discover, and those we dream up for ourselves.

Raised in a Southern charismatic church, Yohan grew up surrounded by music, storytelling, and the expressive possibilities of the human voice, body, and imagination. Those early experiences continue to find their way into a creative life that moves between musical theater, experimental and ritual performance, directing, songwriting, and collaborative creation. Sometimes tender, sometimes mischievous, their work is full of questions about inheritance, estrangement, relation, and becoming.

As a performer, Yohan has worked across theater and musical performance, including their award-winning portrayal of Jelly Roll Morton in Jelly's Last Jam at Hattiloo Theatre, for which they received the 2020 Ostrander Award for Best Lead Actor in a Musical. They are a member of Actors' Equity Association.

As a director and deviser, Yohan creates original and collaboratively developed performances, including A Queering...It's a Wonderful Life, directed during an artist residency at the University of Vermont in Burlington, and Grandfathered In: A Concert of Scenes and Songs, a devised performance work-in-progress. In spring 2027, Yohan will direct Emma: No One But Herself, a new musical by Meghan Brown and Sarah Taylor Ellis, for Duke Theater Studies' Mainstage season.

Much of Yohan's original work grows from encounters with personal memory, family histories, and the things we don't quite know how to explain. Rooted in their experience of growing up Black, mixed, queer, and adopted into a white family in Mississippi's Deep South, Grandfathered In began with a genealogical search into the lives of two great-grandfathers from different branches of their biracial family. That search has grown into an evolving body of songs, archival explorations, and performances, including the developing solo work A Goddess in the Garage. As a singer-songwriter, Yohan makes music that wanders between folk and soul, sometimes feeling a little like worship, sometimes more like a question.

For Yohan, artistic practice is also a way of conducting research. Their current scholarly project, Strange Continua: Performing Queer Encounters of Relation, investigates how artists compose through complicated relationships with history, inheritance, identity, and one another. Their writing has appeared in Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation (Bloomsbury, 2021), with additional work on Black flânerie and James Baldwin's notion of strangeness in Drifting Through Wonderlands: The City as Performance.

Alongside their artistic practice, Yohan teaches acting and performance-making as an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Theater Studies at Duke University. They hold an MA in Theatre Studies from the University of Central Florida and an MFA in European Devised Performance from Columbia College Chicago, completed in conjunction with arthaus.berlin.

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Selected Writing & Research

Published chapter: “Queer Epistemologies in the Making of Queer Makishi: Visibility, Trans-position, and Devised Performance Practice” in Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation (2021)

MFA Thesis: Queer Makishi - A Devised Performance Film

M.A. Thesis: Towards a Postdramatic Jazz Aesthetic: Per(form)ance and Its Discontents