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Fauxnique wields a provocative, wry framework of drag, dance, and philosophy to confront identity, femininity, and self-image.

How Do I Look? is the latest work from Monique Jenkinson/Fauxnique, the multifaceted artist, choreographer, writer, and performer best known as the first cisgender woman anywhere, ever to be crowned as a pageant-winning drag queen. With her rigorous ballet training buried in the bottom of her artistic toolbox, Jenkinson emerged out of a feminist, postmodern, improvisational dance lineage and into the nightclub scene. There, she fashioned Fauxnique in a laboratory of liberatory radical queer performance, reclaiming ballet and learning to use drag and theory as modes of inquiry and entertainment. Jenkinson brings this fluency to this latest work.

Now she dons her drag queen guise and wields her unique combination of precise physicality, irreverent humor, and gutsy vulnerability to ask the most vain, mundane, and loaded question: How Do I Look? With it, she digs past glossy platitudes and flattering exaggerations into the hot mess of perception, subjectivity, identity, and taste. How Do I Look? throws itself into the space—sometimes a chasm—between how we see ourselves and how the world sees us. As always, Jenkinson’s work resists dogmatic answers and leans into philosophical modes of questioning, considering the methodology of looking: by what means do we see the world and each other? By what means other than looking might we perceive each other, art (especially works of art like this one), and the world?

Part roast, part dance, part drag, part stand-up, part performance art, this piece delves into an extreme close-up of the self. How Do I Look? poses a question that generates more questions—can I train myself to look without flinching, without cringing? Can self-knowledge help me to know others? If I roast myself, will you like me more? Is it even possible to roast myself? Do I really want to know?

  • CREDITS

Fauxnique | Performance

Monique Jenkinson | Conception, Creation, Choreography, Writing, Direction

Jesse Hewit | Dramaturgy, Co-direction

Del Medoff | Lighting Design

Marc Kate | Sound Design

How Do I Look?

May 7-9, 2026
Thursday, May 7 | 8pm¹
Friday, May 8 | 8pm²
Saturday, May 9 | 8pm

¹Covid Safe(r) Seating available
² Post-show Talkback

Photo Credit: Robbie Sweeny

About the Artist

Monique Jenkinson(she/her)

Monique Jenkinson

she/her

Photo by Robbie Sweeney

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.

@moniquefauxnique

fauxnique.net

Artist page →

CREDITS

Fauxnique | Performance
Monique Jenkinson | Conception, Creation, Choreography, Writing, Direction
Jesse Hewit | Dramaturgy, Co-direction
Del Medoff | Lighting Design
Marc Kate | Sound Design