Monique Jenkinson
Monique Jenkinson (she/her) is an artist, choreographer, performer, and writer. Her work dwells at the intersection of contemporary dance, cabaret, and essay and considers the performance of femininity as a powerful, vulnerable, and subversive act. Her alter ego, Fauxnique, made herstory as the first cis-woman anywhere ever to be crowned as a pageant-winning drag queen. Her solo performance works have toured nationally and internationally in wide-ranging contexts from nightclubs to theaters to museums in San Francisco, New York City, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Cambridge, Provincetown, Berlin, Catania, Cork, Edinburgh, London, Paris, Reykjavik, Rome, and Zürich.
She has made space for children to design gowns for drag queens at a major museum and created curricula for Studio ACT, Openhouse, St. Mary’s College, and San Francisco Art Institute. She engaged in public conversations with legendary philosopher Judith Butler and RuPaul bestie Michelle Visage in the space of one week. She played The DIRT in Taylor Mac’s Lily’s Revenge (Magic Theater, San Francisco) and Ismene/Eurydike in Anne Carson’s ANTIGONICK (Ashby Stage, Berkeley).
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; GOLDIE and BESTIE awards; and 7x7 Magazine’s “Hot 20.” She has been nominated for the Theater Bay Area, Isadora Duncan Dance, and Herb Alpert Foundation awards and has received support from the 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: A Life in Drag—for which Justin Vivian Bond hailed her as “the Jane Goodall of drag,” and which Michelle Tea called “a playful, engaging, critically serious, counter-culturally crucial memoir”—is out now on Amble Press.
