Jenny Olivia Johnson composes music that ranges from compressed 20-minute operas to epic pop songs to highly abstract religious masses.  She has collaborated with such artsists and ensembles as ICE, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Robot, Bang on a Can, the Arditti Quartet, orkest de ereprijs, the Young People's Chorus of New York City, and New York City Opera, who performed two of her short operas at their VOX Contemporary Opera festivals in 2006 and 2007.

Honors and awards include an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, two CAP grants from the American Music Center, the Prix de Composition from the Fontainebleau Conservatory in France, and residency fellowships from the Banff Centre and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Jenny is currently a finalist for the 2008 Gaudeamus Prize in Amsterdam, where her chamber opera "Leaving Santa Monica" will be performed by the Asko Schoenberg Ensemble this September, and she is also a recipient of the 2008 NYU Dean's Dissertation Fellowship for her dissertation-in-progress, an interdisciplinary study of synaesthesia, acoustic memory, and childhood trauma in the late-20th century United States.