Mia Johnson was born in Vancouver, British Columbia and grew up in the Quilchena neighborhood. In the 1950s, this was a partially cleared forest stretching from King Edward to 33rd Avenue.

Mia earned her Bachelor’s degree in English Literature at Simon Fraser University during the radical years of the 1960s, when it was a wonder anything at all got done. She taught high school art and English in northern British Columbia before majoring in painting and art history at Emily Carr College. During the 1980s, she exhibited life-size paintings of images found in the Endowment Lands at the Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver. Over the next 30 years, she wrote reviews of thousands of gallery exhibits in Washington, Oregon, British Columbia and Alberta, until she finally ran out of things to say about art.

While working as an art reviewer and raising her daughter in the 1990s, Mia earned an MA in art education and a PhD in computer technologies. She was awarded a J. Paul Getty Fellowship for her PhD dissertation on digital art. She wrote several books on children’s art, including two for Lowell House/RGA (Los Angeles). For 15 years, she taught university courses in multimedia, computer graphics and information technology at UBC, BCIT and Kwantlen University.

Since 2001, Mia has owned and operated Kits Media, a friendly website development and hosting company. She lives in Vancouver and is writing a book about her remarkable daughter, who has autism and was blind for fifteen years.