As a scholar-practitioner, Quodesia’s inquiry and engagement center the relationships between culture, connection, systems, healing, and belonging. She explores how people shape and are shaped by culture, and the cultural elements that support or inhibit connection and belonging. Quo is the owner and chief consultant of Quo Johnson Co Project, LLC, a collaborative consulting practice informed by her scholarship, healing-centered training, and interdisciplinary arts career. Through collaborative consulting, she developed her Connect. Heal. Transform. approach to honoring storytelling, lived experiences, mission-rooted initiatives, and cultural practices.

Quodesia’s exploration of culture and belonging guides her collaboration with leaders, staff, boards of directors, artists, educators, and communities across the nonprofit, arts and culture, education, and social justice sectors to strengthen their capacity to meet challenges with courage and compassion. As social justice advisor of OPERA America, a role created for her, she is at the forefront of change toward greater justice in opera in the United States, shifting how the field approaches justice and collaboration. As company culture advisor of The Dallas Opera, she developed and guided the organization’s cultural shift to equity and belonging.

Quo is the founder and space moderator of Black Administrators of Opera, a national community of opera professionals who convene annually in partnership with opera, museum, and cultural organizations. Her program design, curation, and national organizing, convening, and facilitation have made opera history through OPERA America’s first Racial Justice Opera Forum and the Black Administrators of Opera.

Quo has also made meaningful impact as racial equity coach and racial healing practitioner for Dallas Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation, working with education, culture, social justice, and faith-based organizations committed to a more radically inclusive Dallas. She helped develop award-winning arts-integrated curricula and teaching artist training as the social-emotional learning and EDI consultant for Junior Players and has served as equity, diversity, and inclusion committee chair of Bishop Arts Theatre Center.

The Dallas local is a trained Rx Racial Healing Circle™ co-facilitator, Storytelling Blanket™ co-facilitator, Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project, and participant in the American Express Women in Music Leadership Academy, in partnership with Center for Creative Leadership (CCL). Quo is a proud Prairie View A&M University graduate and earned her MA in Arts Administration from Goucher College.

Her writing has been published in HowlRound Theatre Commons, OPERA Magazine, Piano Magazine, The Fulcrum, and Visible Magazine. Her transformational work has been featured in Van Magazine, OPERA Magazine, Texas Monthly, and Art and Seek, among others.

Quo believes that we all deserve spaces that reflect, support, challenge, affirm, and celebrate who we are and all we are capable of becoming. Her life’s work is committed to making this a lived experience for as many people as possible.