Narcissister
Artist-in-Residence
Narcissister is a performance artist whose work focuses on race, gender, and sexuality. For over two decades, she has integrated her background in contemporary dance, visual, and commercial art into a practice spanning live performance, film, video, collage, experimental music, and sculpture.
Narcissister was invited to perform an excerpt of her performance Dollhouse during the Patron Opening of Persona. In this provocative work she plays a “topsy-turvy” doll, the double-ended cloth folk dolls with poignant and disturbing historical roots in slavery in the American South. Narcissister entered Calderwood Hall dressed in a blue velvet hood; as the performance unfolded, she flipped back and forth between standing on her feet and balancing on her hands as she shed layer after layer of her costume to reveal a succession of women beneath.
Narcissister came to the Gardner as an Artist-in-Residence in Winter 2026 on the heels of presenting her performance piece Voyage Into Infinity at NYU Skirball in New York City. This high-energy performance, a feminist reimagining of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s The Way Things Go, unfolds within a chaotic assemblage of objects reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg machine. Her residency came at a perfect moment for her to reflect, rest, and re-energize. It also coincided with the Museum’s exhibition Persona: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self, which featured four of her self-portrait photographs.
Narcissister examined a series of sketches of Thomas Eugene McKeller (1890–1962), a Black man living in Boston whom John Singer Sargent (1858–1925) frequently hired as a model. These figure studies were made for a commission celebrating the expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Between 1917 and 1925, Sargent decorated the building’s new neoclassical rotunda and colonnade with dramatic scenes of white gods and goddesses, all modeled after McKeller’s body. Sargent later gave the sketches to Isabella Stewart Gardner, knowing they would be preserved in her museum.
During her time in Boston, Narcissister made daily trips to the YMCA to swim laps and explored the neighborhood on foot and bicycle. She worked in the Gardner’s apartment studio and conducted Zoom meetings to prepare for upcoming performances in New York, London, and Melbourne. A highlight of her residency was a flashlight tour of the Museum. Accompanied by a security guard and lit only by a flashlight's beam, the after-hours walk in the galleries felt transformative. During this tour, a greater understanding sprang into focus, and the racial politics and the harder truths of the collection emerged from the shadows.
Narcissister, courtesy of the artist
Narcissister has presented work worldwide at festivals, nightclubs, museums, and galleries, including Shubbak Festival, London; MONA's Dark Mofo Festival, Tasmania; Rising Festival, Melbourne, Wiener Festowochen, Vienna; Centre Pompidou, Paris; CCCB, Barcelona; The New Museum, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; the Kitchen, New York; Abrons Art Center, New York; Kendall Koppe Gallery, Glasgow; and Participant Inc, New York, among many others.
Her films have been screened at major festivals. The debut of her first feature film Narcissister Organ Player premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018, followed by the Locarno International Film Festival. Her award-winning short, Narcissister Breast Work, premiered at Sundance in 2020 and at Outfest Los Angeles in 2021, where it won an Outfest Grand Jury Prize.
Narcissister was the 2025 recipient of an Anonymous Was A Woman Award. Previous awards include a Creative Capital Award and a United States Artist’s Award in 2015. Additionally, she was nominated for a Bessie Award in 2013 for the theatrical performance of Organ Player. Narcissister was a 2019 ArtPace resident in San Antonio, Texas, and a 2018 Sundance Theatre Lab Fellow, where she began development of a new evening-length performance commissioned by the Soho Rep theater in New York. Additional residencies include a Keith Haring Fellowship Residency at MacDowell (2023/2015), AZ Encampment, Joshua Tree (2016), and Yaddo (2014). Interested in troubling the divide between popular entertainment and experimental art, she appeared on America’s Got Talent in 2011.
Narcissister spent her junior year of college at the University of California, San Diego studying with artist Faith Ringgold, and at La Sorbonne, Paris, before receiving her BA from Brown University in 1993 in Afro-American Studies. After graduating, she studied with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater before becoming a professional dancer. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Top image credit: Narcissister, Voyage Into Infinity, 2024. Photo by Walter Wlodarczyk. Courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works.