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Sharon Johnston, FAIA
Founder, Partner
Johnston Marklee

Sharon Johnston, FAIA, is a founding partner of Johnston Marklee, based in Los Angeles. Since its establishment in 1998, Johnston Marklee has been recognized nationally and internationally with over 50 major awards, including the 2022 American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award. A book on the work of the firm, entitled HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE, was published by Birkhauser in 2016. Monographs include: 2G N. 67, El Croquis N. 198, and A+U N. 614.

Sharon is Professor in Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design; has taught at Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles; and has held the Cullinan Chair at Rice University and the Frank Gehry International Chair at the University of Toronto. In 2019, Sharon was named Architectural Record’s Women in Architecture: New Generation Leader.

Projects undertaken by Johnston Marklee are diverse in scale and type, spanning fourteen countries throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Past projects include the UCLA Graduate Art Studios campus in Culver City, California; the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas; a renovation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the design of the Dropbox global headquarters in San Francisco. Current projects include the design of the new, permanent home for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP) at Roy Lichtenstein Studio in New York’s Greenwich Village; a renovation of the UCLA Reverend James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center in Los Angeles; the gallery space for Perrotin Los Angeles; and the interior architecture and museology within the Kunstmuseum Hauptbau in Basel Switzerland, in collaboration with Christ & Gantenbein.

The firm’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Architecture Museum of TU Munich. Together with partner Mark Lee, Sharon was the Artistic Director of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial.