William Raymond Johnson grew up on the coast of Maine and attended college at Tulane University in New Orleans. He received his doctorate in Egyptian archaeology from the University of Chicago in 1992 with his dissertation An Asiatic Battle Scene of Tutankhamun from Thebes: A Late Amarna Antecedent of the Ramesside Battle Narrative Tradition.

He has participated in excavations at Fort William Henry in Colonial Pemaquid, Maine; Chogha Mish, Iran; Quseir al-Qadim on the Red Sea coast of Egypt; and Carthage, Tunisia. Johnson joined the Epigraphic Survey, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC, formerly the Oriental Institute), University of Chicago, based at Chicago House in Luxor, in 1979 as an epigraphic draftsman. There, he helped document the Opet reliefs of Tutankhamun in the Great Colonnade Hall of Luxor Temple and began the Luxor Temple fragment project. He served as a senior artist from 1982, became an assistant director in 1995, and was appointed director of the Epigraphic Survey in 1997. He retired from that position in 2022, after 25 years—the longest-serving director and staff member in the history of Chicago House—having expanded the institution’s documentation, conservation and restoration work at Luxor Temple, Medinet Habu, Theban Tomb 107 and Khonsu Temple at Karnak.

Johnson is now an associate of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures; project director of the Memphis Amenhotep III Reused Block Project; a member of the joint American-Egyptian Memphis Hathor Temple Mission of the Houston Museum of Science; co-director, with James Heidel, of the CFEETK Karnak Third Pylon Documentation Project; and director of the Amarna Talatat Project, where he is reconstructing wall scenes from the stone monuments of Akhenaten and Nefertiti’s cult city to the Aten. In 2024, he held a Bicentennial Fellowship at the Museo Egizio in Turin to study the museum’s collection of Amarna blocks for publication.