Performing in the PATHETIC HAPPENING at The Poetry Project NYC, 2023.
Abortion Stories at The Brooklyn Museum, 2023
“In addition to celebrating the beauty of her vaginal mucus, Clifford’s PussyBow is intended to serve as a call to arms at a time when women’s reproductive rights are increasingly under attack.”
BODY FREEDOM FOR EVERY (BODY), 2024
“Shameless and fearless and unafraid to speak truth to power!”
“Christen Clifford is...hilarious and uncensored”
Christen Clifford is a multidisciplinary feminist artist, mother, writer, curator, filmmaker, and performer. Her first risograph artbook, BabyLove, was acquired by the Thomas J. Watson Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Her standing room only LIVE INTERIORS performance in October 2025 at 12 Franklin was repeated by popular demand in November 2025.
INTERIORS: We Are All Pink Inside was shown at The Brooklyn Museum in January 2023 and with a new performance INTERIORITY at Crystal Bridges/ The Momentary in November 2022. Clifford’s work has been seen at The Newark Museum of Art, The New Museum, The Lyman Allyn Art Museum, LACE, Project for Empty Space, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Harold J Miossi Gallery, ArtShareLA, Cummings Gallery, Bolivar Art Gallery, Art In Odd Places, Panoply Performance Lab and The Museum of Motherhood.
Her work was included in the 2024/2025 touring exhibition BODY FREEDOM FOR EVERY (BODY) produced with Project for Empty Space, and in NYC also with The Armory Show and Times Square Arts; in Newark produced with PES and Planned Parenthood of Greater New Jersey. Clifford also presented SIGNAL CELEBRATION: a sign making workshop for Bodily Autonomy, public workshops using recycled materials, in Times Square with support from Times Square Arts and was part of The Armory Show, and again at Championship Plaza.
Clifford is fundraising for her autobiographical art film Cancer: A Love Story supported by the Independent Film Project (now Gotham) and Women Make Movies (you can make a tax-deductible donation!). The teaser/proof of concept won a Women in Film award and screened at Netflix. She was an IFP Documentary Screen Forward Fellow. She is the winner of the Gregory Millard Nonfiction Fellowship from NYFA, as well as grants from Newark Creative Catalyst, NYC Artist Corps, LMCC, NYSCA, and she was a Feminist-in-Residence at Project for Empty Space. Clifford was nominated for the ANONYMOUS WAS A WOMAN award in 2023.
She was a reader at the PATHETIC HAPPENING at the Poetry Project organized by Tom Cole and Eileen Myles. Clifford has also been a Mainstage storyteller for The Moth, a mentor at Girls Write Now, a salesperson at Victoria’s Secret, an art model, a cashier, a bartender and a waiter.
WRITER: Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, The Guardian, Vice, Culturebot, Filmmaker Magazine, and the essay Mother, Daughter Moustache in the NYTimes bestselling anthology Women In Clothes - reissued in 2026 - and an essay in The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art.
SELECT PRESS: NFT of my cervix for Every Woman Biennial in eflux, I Want Your Blood in Abortion Is Normal, in Hyperallergic, Interiors: We Are All Pink Inside in ARTFORUM and Hyperallergic, PussyBow in NYLON, Refinery29, the Huffington Post, and Mashable. Sinéad Gleeson references my work in Entertainment Weekly. Identities of a feminist performance artist interview with 3AM. Clifford’s work has also been written about in The New York Times, Paper Magazine, Dazed, ArtNet, Bookforum and artNews.
She teaches at The New School and co-curates Experiments and Disorders at Dixon Place. Clifford is a studio member at Project for Empty Space, Newark.
She lives in Jackson Heights and online on Instagram at @cd_clifford
Email: christen.clifford@newschool.edu.
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”