Nao Bustamante is a legendary artist, originally from a small town in the Central Valley of California, who now resides in Los Angeles. Bustamante’s precarious work is cross-genre. She has exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York MoMA, Sundance International Film Festival, Outfest International Film Festival, The Park Avenue Armory and El Museo del Barrio.
She has received numerous awards including, the Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, a Lambent Fellow, and the Chase Legacy award in Film, co-sponsored with Kodak and HBO. She has been an Artist in Residence of the American Studies Association, Skowhegan and Artpace. Bustamante was awarded the CMAS-Benson Latin American Collection Research Fellowship, Artist in Residence at UC Riverside and a UC MEXUS Scholar. Bustamante’s 360º mini-series, “The Wooden People” received a producing grant from the Mike Kelley Foundation, and the National Performance Network. TWP was previewed at REDCAT in 2021. She was a fellow with the California Fund for Visual Artists and received the Philip Guston Rome Prize in 2024. She is an alum of the San Francisco Art Institute’s notorious New Genres program, and in 2020 was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from her alma mater. Currently she holds the position of Professor of Art at USC Roski School of Art and Design.
Bustamante has influenced a generation of artists. The late scholar Jose Muñoz wrote, “I want to call attention to the ways in which Bustamante’s performance practice engages and re-imagines what has been a history of violence, degradation, and compulsory performance. For a female artist of color to engage this field is not only historically loaded, but it is also extremely vulnerable making.”
Follow her @naobustamante and @gravegalleryLA for more of everything.
