C. Richard Johnson, Jr. was born in Macon, GA in 1950. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, along with the first PhD minor in Art History granted by Stanford, in 1977. Following 4 years on the faculty at Virginia Tech, he joined the Cornell University faculty in 1981, where he is the Geoffrey S. M. Hedrick Senior Professor of Engineering and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow.

At the start of 2007, after 30 years of research on adaptive feedback systems theory and blind equalization in communication receivers, Professor Johnson accepted a 5-year appointment as an Adjunct Research Fellow of the Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) to facilitate the interaction of art historians and conservation specialists with algorithm-building signal processors. In 2013, Professor Johnson was appointed a Scientific Researcher of the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and Computational Art History Advisor to the RKD - Netherlands Institute for Art History (the Hague, the Netherlands).

Professor Johnson founded the Thread Count Automation Project (TCAP) in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum in 2007, initiated the Historic Photographic Paper Classification (HPPC) challenge in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, launched the Chain Line Pattern (CLiP) Matching Project with the Morgan Library & Museum in 2012, with the Rijksmuseum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art joining the project in 2013, and the Dutch University Institute for Art History joining in 2014, and created the project on Watermark Identification in Rembrandt's Etchings (WIRE) in collaboration with Erik Hinterding (Rijksmuseum) and Andy Weislogel (Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art) in 2015.

At the start of 2016, Professor Johnson took up residence at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech as the Jacobs Fellow in Computational Arts and Humanities.

For an overview of Professor Johnson's research activities in computational art history read year-end research reports for 2014 or 2012-2013 or the interview in the inaugural issue in 2015 of the International Journal for Digital Art History.

Professor Johnson's efforts in computational art history have been supported in part by the National Science Foundation (Grant CCF-1048352, "Counting Van Gogh and Vermeer"), the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Grant 040.11.228), the Samuel H. Kress Foundation (``Injecting Signal Processing in the Conservation Curriculum'''), the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), the Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY, USA), the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (the Hague, the Netherlands), and gifts to Cornell University by Geoffrey S. M. Hedrick, Stephen H. Weiss, and David and Miriam Donoho.