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Kia Michelle Benbow, known professionally as Kia LaBeija, is an image maker and storyteller born and raised in the heart of New York City, Hell’s Kitchen. Her multidisciplinary approach to art making includes photography, writing, performance, collage, design, and film. She composes cinematic and theatrical autobiographical works by staging, re-imagining, sometimes documenting in real time, or all of the above. Her performative self-portraits embody memory and dream like imagery to narrate complex stories at the intersections of womanhood, sexuality, and navigating the world as a mixed race woman living with HIV.
She’s presented work at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Tate Modern, The Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of The City of New York, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The International Center for Photography, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and the Performa ’19 Biennial. Highlighted commissions and partnerships include W Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Apple, DAZED, OUT Magazine, Vice, Dr. Martens and Triple Canopy.
In 2018 she was featured on the cover of the January issue of Artforum — as only the fourth black female artist to achieve such a recognition.
Her first solo museum show prepare my heart premiered at Fotografiska New York in 2022. Her highly regarded exhibition of original photographs, ephemera, objects and family images chronicles love, loss, and growing up HIV-positive in New York City.
Heavily involved in New York’s Iconic House and Ballroom scene for over a decade, Kia was a member of the Royal House of LaBeija from 2012 to 2019, serving as the Overall Mother from 2017 to 2019. She played the title role of Dove in Band Pillar Point’s viral music video, and appeared as a Principal Dancer in the pilot episode of Ryan Murphy’s Ballroom Drama POSE.
Kia received a BA from the New School University and is an incoming MFA student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago — where she received a New Artist Society full merit scholarship. She is a 2019 Creative Capital Awardee alongside her partner Taína Larot.
