Rachel Rampleman

Brooklyn-based artist, archivist and cultural anthropologist Rachel Rampleman creates bodies of work that explore gender, artifice, and spectacle. Utilizing directorial, curatorial, and collaborative processes, she showcases irrepressible personalities who challenge convention, rewrite the rules, and embody the range of gender expression. A sampling of subjects include Girls Girls Girls - the world's first and only all-female Mötley Crüe tribute band, and Tazzie Colomb - the world's longest competing professional female bodybuilder. With her current and ongoing project "Life is Drag", she uses high definition video to document performances by and interviews with alt-drag and neo-burlesque artists. Having so far captured 375 performances by more than 200 artists, the "Life is Drag" archive has evolved into a vast chronicle of American drag culture, spanning cities, generations, and genres - and serves as the largest digital archive of drag performance in the United States.

Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, and currently living and working in New York City, she received her MFA from New York University in 2006. Since then her work has been shown internationally at the Shanghai Biennale (Brooklyn Pavilion, 2012-13) in China, the Chennai Photo Biennale (India), JAM in Bangkok, Thailand, and throughout Europe at S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst) and Art Cinema OFFoff (Ghent, Belgium), Monte Arts Centre (Antwerp, Belgium), Terasa (Pilsen, Czech Republic), C/O Berlin, Die Fruhperle, and The Secret Cabinet (Berlin, Germany), and at VIDEONALE.16 at the Kunstmuseum Bonn.