MONOMYTHS artist portrait, 2016. Photo by Henry Chan.
Nao Bustamante is an internationally known artist, originally from the San Joaquin Valley of California; cutting her teeth as an artist in the San Francisco “Art Scene” between 1984-2001. She attended San Francisco Art Institute, where she fell under the influence of the notorious New Genres Department. Bustamante’s at times precarious and radically vulnerable work encompasses performance art, video installation, visual art, filmmaking, and writing.
Bustamante has presented in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites all around the world. She has exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York Museum of Modern Arts, Sundance 2008, 2010, and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. Her movies have been shown at venues and festivals across the globe, including OUTFEST – Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, MIX New York City, MIX Brasil, and the London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Bustamante is popularly known for her appearance in the Bravo Network television show A Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, where she made her mark as a messy and complex character.
The Theatre Communications Group in the book, Out of the Fringe, as well as the Theatre Drama Review, published by the MIT Press, has published Bustamante. In 2000 she received the GLBT Historical Society Arts Award. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and in 2007 named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, as well as a Lambent Fellow. In 2008 She received the Chase Legacy award in Film (In conjunction with Kodak and HBO). And was the Artist in Residence of the American Studies Association in 2012. In 2013, Bustamante was awarded the (Short-term) CMAS-Benson Latin American Collection Research Fellowship and also a Makers Muse Award from the Kindle Foundation. Currently Bustamante is the Queer Artist in Residence at UC Riverside and preparing for an upcoming solo exhibit at Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles. Bustamante’s video work is in the Kadist Collection.
Bustamante is alum of the San Francisco Art Institute, New Genres program and the Skowhegen School of Painting and Sculpture as a Video Fellow. Currently she holds the position of Associate Professor of New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.