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Kia LaBeija

Biography

Born and raised in New York City, LaBeija is of African-American and Filipino descent. Her multidisciplinary practice combines photography, performance, dance, collage, installation, video, and self-portraiture, often drawing on personal history and lived experience. Her work examines love, loss, identity, stigma, sexuality, family, and belonging.


LaBeija has been deeply connected to New York's House and Ballroom community. She served as Overall Mother of the House of LaBeija and has incorporated ballroom history and culture into her artistic practice. Her work also addresses her experience growing up HIV-positive and the broader histories of HIV/AIDS through autobiographical photography, performance, and storytelling.


Her work has been presented by institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Fotografiska New York. prepare my heart, presented at Fotografiska in 2022, was her first solo museum exhibition and first New York solo show.


BQW Impact

LaBeija's practice centers queer Black womanhood while connecting personal storytelling with photography, performance, ballroom culture, and HIV/AIDS history. Her work creates space for experiences shaped by race, sexuality, gender, illness, family, memory, and belonging.


Her longstanding relationship with ballroom and her work as an artist and mentor have also connected her practice to queer and trans communities of color. Through performance and visual storytelling, she brings personal and community histories into contemporary art spaces.


Notable Works

  • 24

    Photographic self-portrait series drawing on LaBeija's experience growing up as a young woman of color living with HIV.

  • Untitled, The Black Act (2019)

    Large-scale performance work reinterpreting Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet through dance, portraiture, performance, space, memory, and personal history.

  • prepare my heart (2022)

    Autobiographical solo exhibition at Fotografiska New York exploring love, loss, growing up HIV-positive, family, identity, and LaBeija's relationship to New York's Ballroom scene.

  • Photographs from The Plague in the Shadows (2024)

    Collection of portraits of people at the center of the early years of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, created as a companion exhibition to WNYC and HISTORY's Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows.

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