Known for using the humble felt-tip marker to create majestic portraiture, TextaQueen is a disabled, queer, settler-immigrant artist of Goan descent living on unceded Wurundjeri land. Drawing out complex intersectional politics while creating in collaborative processes with other diasporic and disabled people, TextaQueen envisions alternate universes of collective and transformative possibility. 

Encompassing drawing, painting, printmaking, video, performance, curating, music, writing and murals presented across institutional, commercial, and independent spaces, TextaQueen’s practice disrupts the ‘isms entrenched in the status quo. They contemplate dis/connection to cultural and colonial legacies, interrogating the many ways in which they find themselves precariously balanced across ancestral and stolen lands.

Over TextaQueen’s twenty five year career, their work has appeared across so-called Australia at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Arts House, Melbourne; Moonah Arts Centre for MONA FOMA, Hobart; 4a Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth; and internationally at Western Exhibitions, Chicago; 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London; Mimosa House, London; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Schwules Museum, Berlin and Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Darmstadt. Their work is in the collections of National Gallery of Victoria, University of Queensland, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Mornington Peninsular Regional Gallery, State Library of Victoria, and National Portrait Gallery of Australia. In 2017, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery nationally toured TextaQueen’s mid-career survey, ‘Between You and Me’.

Mural commissions include Murray Art Museum Albury, Merri-Bek City Council, City of Darebin, Flash Forward for City of Melbourne, and Friends of the Earth, Collingwood.

They have undertaken a 2023 Writers Victoria Writeability  Mentorship with Narungga poet Natalie Harkin; creative mentorships with Black Panther artist Emory Douglas and disability justice worker and writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarashina in Oakland, California; a 2017 State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship and numerous residencies including ACME, London; International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; Kriti Gallery, Varanasi, India; Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield; and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.

In 2024, TextaQueen launched TheySwarm, a peer-mentorship artist residency and intimate event space for diverse, dispersed and disabled artists, in their Johnston Street, Collingwood studio on Wurundjeri land.

ID: Photo of a non-binary Goan femme in semi-profile with abstract, pastel video projection over their bare brown upper torso, face and black wavy hair. They cast a shadow on wall behind.

Image credit: Leah Jing McIntosh