MONIQUE JENKINSON is an artist, performer, choreographer, and writer. Lauded for a “campy, intellectual juxtaposition of pop culture and high art,” her work considers the performance of femininity as a powerful, vulnerable, and subversive act. She made “herstory” as the first cis-woman to win a major drag queen pageant and subsequently her solo performance works have toured nationally and internationally in wide-ranging contexts from nightclubs to theaters to museums—from Joe’s Pub, New Museum, and the historic Stonewall in New York City, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, ODC Theater, The Stud, CounterPulse and de Young Museum in San Francisco, and in Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Provincetown, London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Zürich, Paris, Reykjavik, Rome, Catania and Cork.
She has created space for kids to dress drag queens at a major museum and created college curricula. She played the DIRT (originated by Justin Vivian Bond) in Taylor Mac’s Lily’s Revenge and Eurydike in Anne Carson’s ANTIGONICK. She engaged in a public conversation with Gender Studies luminary Judith Butler and RuPaul bestie Michelle Visage within days of each other.
Honors include residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Tanzhaus Zürich and Atlantic Center for the Arts, an Irvine Fellowship and residency at the de Young Museum, San Francisco Bay Guardian GOLDIE and Bay Area Reporter BESTIE awards and 7X7 Magazine’s “Hot 20.” She has been nominated for the Theater Bay Area, Isadora Duncan Dance (IZZIE) and Herb Alpert Foundation awards and has received support from San Francisco Arts Commission, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, CHIME, Center for Cultural Innovation and the Kenneth Rainin and Zellerbach Family foundations.
Her memoir, Faux Queen will be published by Amble Press in early 2022.
