About this campaign
Monique Jenkinson is fiscally sponsored by Dancers' Group.
I am an artist, performer, choreographer and writer with the unique distinction of being the first cisgender woman anywhere, ever to be crowned as a pageant-winning drag queen. My 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, Catharine Clark Gallery 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. My newest work How Do I Look? premieres at ODC Theater (April 2026) and moves to On the Boards in Seattle (May 2026).
I have created space for kids to dress drag queens at a major museum and created college curricula. I played the DIRT (originated by Justin Vivian Bond) in Taylor Mac’s Lily’s Revenge and Eurydike in Anne Carson’s ANTIGONICK. I engaged in public conversation with legendary theorist Judith Butler and RuPaul bestie Michelle Visage within days of each other. Published works include an essay on the work of visual artist Deborah Oropallo in Moving Pictures (Schneider Museum of Art, 2024) and a memoir, Faux Queen: A Life in Drag (Amble Press/Bywater Books, 2022).
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, the inaugural Della Davidson Prize, GOLDIE and BESTIE awards and 7X7 Magazine’s “Hot 20.” I have been nominated for Theater Bay Area, Isadora Duncan Dance (IZZIE) and Herb Alpert Foundation awards and have received support from San Francisco Arts Commission, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, CHIME, CA$H, Center for Cultural Innovation, Mendenhall-Horan Fund/Philadelphia Foundation and the Kenneth Rainin and Zellerbach Family foundations.
Artist Statement
I make performance that uses dance, drag and essay to consider the complicated, subjective condition of femininity. From my earliest work, I have been informed by queer performance, theory and serious classical ballet training, as well as the postmodern, feminist lineage out of which I emerged. My drag guise Fauxnique expands beyond pop form into experimental practice and mines drag vocabulary for classical rigor and movement exploration. She also sings. I was on the vanguard of what is now familiar: museums and larger institutions extolling nightclub culture as queer history and respectable art. I exist confidently at the crossroads of cabaret and contemporary dance.