Ayana Evans is a Chicago born, NYC-based, performance artist and activist. Her guerilla-style performances have been staged at El Museo del Barrio, The Barnes Foundation, The Bronx Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, Newark Museum, Queens Museum and a variety of free public locations.
Evans' ongoing public interventions include Operation Catsuit and I Just Came Here to Find a Husband. Upcoming performances include Wellesley College's Taking Off the White Gloves showcase and Giving You the Best That We Got: The Ayana & Tsedaye Variety Show at the Center for Performance Research. Her annual C.R.E.A.M. Career Fair For More Than Just Survival welcomed over 200 attendees in 2023, and transformed Brooklyn's Weeksville Heritage Center into both a job-hunting space and interactive environment for formerly incarcerated folks trying to re-enter the workforce.
Evans holds an MFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art and a BA in Visual Arts from Brown University. At present she is an adjunct-professor at Brown University and the Editor at Large at CultBytes.
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This work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, ArtNet, Hyperallergic, and The Cut. She is the 2017-2018 awardee of the Franklin Furnace Fund for performance, the 2018 New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) Fellow for Interdisciplinary Arts, the 2021-2022 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and 2022 Chamberlain Award winner at Headlands Art Center.
Evans has completed residencies at Yaddo, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, and Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.
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