Projects
Woven Between Worlds develops interdisciplinary projects exploring identity, cultural memory, belonging, and the experience of existing between worlds.
Our work moves across storytelling, oral history, visual art, performance, research, exhibitions, media, and community-based practice — creating different ways for people to encounter, share, and reflect on lived experience.
Storytelling & Archives
Woven Between Worlds Podcast
The Woven Between Worlds Podcast extends the project’s storytelling work through conversations about identity, culture, creativity, community, and belonging.
Episodes feature voices from the Guatemalan Interview Project alongside artists, cultural practitioners, community members, and others whose lives and work exist between different worlds.
The podcast creates space for conversations that do not require simple answers — allowing identity, culture, and belonging to remain complex and evolving.
Guatemalan Interview Project
Founded in 2025 the Guatemalan Interview Project is an ongoing storytelling and oral history initiative documenting the diverse experiences of Guatemalans around the world.
Originally developed through Johanna Kepler’s graduate research at Duke University, the project began as an exploration of adoption, cultural memory, identity, and belonging. It has since grown into a larger community archive bringing together stories from Guatemalan adoptees, first-generation Guatemalans, members of the diaspora, and others navigating their relationships to Guatemala.
Through recorded conversations, written stories, and audio, the project explores themes of home, family, migration, adoption, language, cultural reconnection, identity, and belonging.
Rather than presenting one definition of what it means to be Guatemalan, the project preserves the complexity of many different experiences — including the contradictions, questions, and changing relationships people may have with culture and identity.
2025-Present
Power of Performing Arts
Founded in 2020, Power of the Performing Arts is an interview and storytelling project documenting the voices of artists, performers, choreographers, directors, and cultural leaders.
The project began as a way to explore how artists understand creativity, leadership, community, and the role of the performing arts in society.
Through hundreds of conversations, the project became an early foundation for the storytelling and community-building practices that would later grow into Woven Between Worlds.
Exhibitions & Performance
Woven Between Worlds
Woven Between Worlds is an interdisciplinary exhibition exploring cultural memory, adoption, identity, and reconnection through textile, movement, oral history, drawing, and visual art.
Created as part of Johanna Kepler’s MFA research at Duke University, the exhibition brought together artistic research conducted in Guatemala with more than 100 stories from the Guatemalan Interview Project.
The installation centered on a large-scale woven textile alongside interviews, drawings, research materials, and visual works examining the ways memory and identity can be carried across bodies, generations, and places.
Duke University 2026
Weaving Dreams
Weaving Dreams is an interdisciplinary performance combining contemporary dance, oral history, sound, textile research, and storytelling.
Developed alongside the Woven Between Worlds exhibition, the work explores adoption, cultural memory, ancestry, displacement, and the process of reconnecting with a culture from which one has been separated.
Voices from the Guatemalan Interview Project are woven throughout the performance, placing individual movement within a larger collective story of identity and belonging.
Duke University 2025
Weaving Self
Weaving Self is a solo performance exploring intersectionality, memory, identity, and the experience of holding multiple selves at once.
Using the weaving methodology, the work considers identity not as something fixed, but as something continually constructed, unraveled, remembered, and rewoven.
The body becomes both archive and loom — holding histories while continuously creating new possibilities for belonging.
Duke University 2026
13 Batz Documentary Film
Weaving Dreams is an interdisciplinary performance combining contemporary dance, oral history, sound, textile research, and storytelling.
Developed alongside the Woven Between Worlds exhibition, the work explores adoption, cultural memory, ancestry, displacement, and the process of reconnecting with a culture from which one has been separated.
Voices from the Guatemalan Interview Project are woven throughout the performance, placing individual movement within a larger collective story of identity and belonging.
Duke University 2026
Born from a Plane
Born From a Plane is a short documentary film created as part of Johanna Kepler’s thesis exhibition, exploring her personal adoption story alongside the journeys of ten other Guatemalan adoptees living between Guatemala and the United States. Through interviews, archival material, personal reflection, and place-based imagery, the film weaves together experiences of separation, return, identity, family, and cultural reconnection. Rather than presenting adoption as a single narrative, Born From a Plane holds space for the complexity of multiple adoptee experiences and the different ways people understand home, heritage, and belonging across borders.
Duke University 2025
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