She was born as Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp in 1880 in Atlanta, Georgia, to Laura Douglas and George Camp.  Both parents were of mixed ancestry, with her mother having African-American and Native American heritage, and her father of African-American and English heritage.

Camp lived much of her childhood in Rome, Georgia. It was there and in Atlanta that she received her education.  She  excelled in reading, recitations and physical education.  Camp taught herself to play the violin and developed a lifelong love of music that she expressed in her plays.

She graduated from Atlanta University's Normal School in 1896 and taught school in Marietta, Georgia after she left college. In 1902 she left her teaching career to pursue her interest in music, attending Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. She wrote music from 1898 until 1959. After studying in Oberlin, Johnson returned to Atlanta, where she became assistant principal in a public school.

On September 28, 1903, Camp married Henry Lincoln Johnson (1870–1925), an Atlanta lawyer and prominent Republican party member who was ten years older than her.  Douglas and Johnson had two sons, Henry Lincoln Johnson, Jr., and Peter Douglas Johnson (d. 1957).  In 1910, they moved to Washington, DC, when her husband was appointed Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia, a political patronage position under Republican President William Howard Taft.  While the city had an active cultural life among the elite people of color, it was far from the Harlem literary center of New York, to which Johnson became attracted.

Johnson's marital life was affected by her writing ambition, because her husband was not supportive of her literary passion, insisting that she devote more time to being a homemaker,  not on publishing poetry. But in Washington Johnson met many of the leading African American artists and she was inspired to write.  In 1918 she published her first book of poetry, The Heart of a Woman.  Its' searing lyriscicm reflected her frustration at the racial and gender prejudices of her era. With the publication of her second book of poetry, Bronze, in 1922, Johnson became the most widely published woman poet of the Harlem Renaissance, a nationwide movement to create new African-American art.  She published a total of four volumns of poetry.

After her hucband's death, she began writing plays and was one of the earliest female African-American playwrights, and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance.  Sadly most of Johnson’s plays were destroyed after her death, when workers inadvertently threw them away while clearing her house.

After her husband's death in 1925, Johnson began to host weekly "Saturday Salons" for freinds and authors, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer, Richard Bruce Nugent, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimke and Eulalie Spence — all major contributors to the New Negro Movement, which is better known today as the Harlem Renaissance.  Georgia Douglas Johnson's house at 1461 S Street NW would later become known as the S Street Salon. The salon was a meeting place for writers in Washington, D.C., during the Harlem Renaissance. For four decades Johnson's S Street Salon helped nurture and sustain creativity by providing a place for African-American artists to meet, socialize, discuss their work, and exchange ideas.

The death of her husband necessitated her having to support herself and her two sons until they graduated from medical school and law school respectively.  Johnson worked for more than a decade at the U.S. Department of Labor.  During this same timeframe she published another volume of poetry, "An Autumn Love Cycle", and several plays.  From 1926 through 1932 she wrote a weekly column, "Homely Philosophy", which was syndicated in over twenty newspapers.

Gorgia Douglas Johnson  published her final book, "Share My World", in 1962.  In 1965, she was awarded an honory doctorate in literature from Atlanta University.  She died in Washington, D.C. in 1966.

In 2010, she was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.