[2] His father, John Seward Johnson II, was an artist known for his life-size bronze statues made of castings of living people depicting them in quotidian situations.

[6] In 2003, Johnson hired Jonah Peretti as Director of Research and Development with the purpose of establishing the web as a place for art experiments.

[7] Eyebeam also produced the first geocoding of public campaign finance data, later served up as the site Fundrace and hosted by the Huffington Post.

[17] During his time at Harmony, Johnson has co-authored a number of research publications, including Audience preferences are predicted by temporal reliability of neural processing published in Nature Communications,[18] Measuring Impact: The Importance of Evaluation for Documentary Film Campaigns published in M/C Journal,[19] Trailer brain: Neural and behavioral analysis of social issue documentary viewing with low-density EEG published in The International Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN’16),[20] and “No Fracking Way!” Documentary Film, Discursive Opportunity, and Local Opposition against Hydraulic Fracturing in the United States, 2010 to 2013 published in the American Sociological Review.

[24] In 2006, Johnson purchased a local weekly paper in Nosara, La Voz de Guanacaste, and in 2015 turned it into Costa Rica's first non profit investigative newspaper.

Johnson is also a Trustee of the Atlantic Foundation,[35] which provides grants to such organizations as Eyebeam, Brooklyn Waldorf School, Mary McDowell, Grounds for Sculpture,[36] and Amigos of Costa Rica.

In 2003, Johnson was announced as a Henry Crown Fellow for the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit organization that “promotes the pursuit of common ground and deeper understanding in a nonpartisan and non-ideological setting”.