Taja Lindley

Taja Lindley is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the founder and managing member of Colored Girls Hustle, and a member of Echoing Ida and Harriet’s Apothecary. Lindley considers herself a healer and an activist, creating socially engaged artwork that reflects and transforms audiences, shifts culture and moves people to action. She uses movement, text, installation, ritual, burlesque, and film to create works that are concerned with freedom, healing and pleasure. In 2017, she was an Artist in Residence at Dixon Place, an artistic incubator founded in 1986 that provides creatives with the resources and space to create original bodies of work in the areas of theater, dance, music, puppetry, circus arts, literature, and visual arts. This residency culminated in the creation of “The Bag Lady Manifesta” in September 2017. In 2007, she received her Bachelor of the Arts from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study where she designed her own major that focused on public policy, knowledge production, and health outcomes for women of color.

Her artwork has been featured at Spring/Break Art Show, Brooklyn Museum, Hammer Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, New York Live Arts, the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), the Gallatin Arts Festival at New York University, WOW Café Theater, and La Mama Theater. She recently exhibited her work at Art Basel Miami with Guerrilla Girls and Yoko Ono. She has received coverage in the New York Times, VICE, ELLE, Blouin Art Info, Art Zealous and Artnet News, and ARTSY. In 2014, she was a Create Change Fellow with the Laundromat Project and selected to participate in EMERGENYC – an artist activist program of New York University’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. In addition to being an artist, Lindley is actively engaged in social movements as a writer, consultant, and facilitator. For over a decade she has worked with non-profits, research institutes and government on policies and programming that impact women and girls, communities of color, low/no/fixed-income families, queer people, youth and immigrants. Her writing has appeared in Rewire, YES! Magazine, Feministe, Salon and EBONY.