After several years of performing, composing his own work in collaboration with dancers, actors, musicians and visual artists, he began to design and direct choreography that included film/video and live acoustic and electronic sound.
After his first large-scale exhibition-performances in Houston in the late 1980s (Description of a Landscape, Invisible Cities), he founded an ensemble, AlienNation Co.. which has toured internationally and presented work at festivals, theatres, cultural centers and conferences.
He has also created an opera (Orpheus and Eurydike, 1992) and a site-specific installation of Wagner's Parsifal, several documentary films and dance videos, and produced public art projects with artists or cultural workers in Houston, Chicago, Havana, Ljubljana, Eisenhüttenstadt, Dresden, and Göttelborn.
He has received numerous arts grants, awards, and fellowships for his work and the concepts for his intercultural productions, and in the late 1990s was invited to create the new dance and technology Masters Program at The Ohio State University (1999–2003).
Johannes Birringer's books include: He has co-edited the anthology Tanz im Kopf/Dance and Cognition (2005), published by the German Dance Association (GTF), and Die Welt als virtuelles Environment (2007, TMA Hellerau).