Nao Bustamante

Nao Bustamante is a Chicana multimedia and performance artist, from the San Joaquin Valley in California. Her work encompasses performance art, sculpture, installation and video and explores issues of ethnicity, class, gender, performativity, and the body. She has performed in galleries, museums, universities and underground sites throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Mexico and the United States. Her collaborations include working with such luminaries as Coco Fusco and the experimental arts entity Osseus Labyrint. She has been called "the doyenne of the Bay Area’s underground cultural scene." She currently serves as Associate Professor and Vice Dean of Art at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. Before this position, she served as Associate Professor of New Media and Live Art at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. She has exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York Museum of Modern Art, Sundance, and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. In 2007, Bustamante was named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. Bustamante competed in the first season of Bravo's Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.

Bustamante was born in California. She first trained in postmodern dance before moving into the realm of performance in the mid-1980s. She holds a BFA/MA from the San Francisco Art Institute.

In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman Award and in 2007 was named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow as well as a Lambent Fellow.

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