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Heather Benjamin (b. 1989, Tarrytown, New York) is an American artist renowned for her evocative, autobiographical works that explore the complexities of womanhood, sexuality, and personal trauma. Based in New York City, Benjamin holds a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design (2016) and initially gained recognition through her roots in DIY zine and comics culture. Since 2008, she has self-published zines and artist books, including her acclaimed anthology Sad Sex (2012, Desert Island) and Romantic Story (2015), blending raw emotion with intricate visuals.
Her practice has evolved from reproducible zines to singular, large-scale drawings and paintings on paper and canvas, often featuring mystical, hybrid female figures—part human, part animal—that serve as avatars for her personal experiences. These works oscillate between strength and vulnerability, confronting themes of intimacy, body dysmorphia, and resilience with a visceral, diaristic intensity. Benjamin’s influences, including Japanese manga like Sailor Moon, inform her bold, graphic style, while her exhibitions—spanning solo shows at venues like Muddguts (NYC), New Image Art (LA), and Commune (Tokyo), and group shows at Jeffrey Deitch (LA) and Hashimoto Contemporary (SF)—underscore her international presence. A recipient of a self-publishing grant from Printed Matter and the Andy Warhol Foundation, Benjamin continues to push boundaries, weaving personal narratives into universal truths about identity and self-acceptance.
Heather currently has a solo show at OLYMPIA Gallery, in New York, which will run until March 29th.
Profile pictures by Ben Trogdon
Hi Heather! It’s a pleasure to sit down with you! First question that I always ask. How does a regular day look like for you in New York?
Heather: Since I work for myself, my schedule is very project based, and changes based on whether I’m working on a big deadline or not. For instance, leading up to my solo show that just opened in New York, I was working 6 or 7 days a week in my studio, getting there around 9AM and staying until 9 or 10pm. And my “day off” was for everything else – grocery shopping, laundry, meal prep. So I truly was just working for pretty much all my waking hours! But now that my show has been open for a few weeks, my schedule is different. I’m working in the studio, but I’m also giving myself some days off, doing a little self care, and spending time at the gallery meeting people at the show. When I get back to some non-show normalcy in my schedule, it looks like something in between the two – getting to studio around 9/10am, and staying until 6 or 7, a little bit more of a life/work balance. But still always skewed towards work, because when you work for yourself, and enjoy what you do, you could really just constantly be working.
I’m curious, growing up what kind of kid were you? What did you enjoy doing, and how did you spend your time?
Heather: I was always an “art kid”, so drawing and painting and generally making stuff were always the main way I liked to spend my time. But I also had a really active imagination and loved playing pretend, especially very like, epic, adventure-y, outdoors type stuff. Like, making up elaborate narrative-based games with friends and playing them in the woods for hours. We moved around a ton when I was a kid, but I always managed to find some friends who were down to do that with me.
So when did you start painting, and when did you start taking being an artist seriously?
Heather: I did some paintings in high school, but that was really just dabbling in art classes and summer pre-college programs. When I started taking art seriously, it wasn’t through painting, it was making zines of my drawings, and self-publishing them myself. Those zines were the first things I got any attention for art wise, and I love/d drawing, plus they were so cheap to make – I just photocopied them, using a FedEx Office employee discount code that was circulating in the self-publshing world at the time – so what’s already a very cheap medium to disseminate your work became even cheaper, and I was able to make tons of copies and give them out for free. And then when I started selling them, I could price them so low – l think they were $3 – and still make a few bucks, since making one zine cost me like, a few cents. So that was huge. I got curated into some group shows in actual art galleries in Chelsea when I was 19/20, just showing the original drawings for those zines, which were micron on printer paper, drawn to scale at 8.5 x 11 inches. And then I also was nominated for and won a self-publishing grant through Printed Matter around that time, and that was the first time I saw any real money of my own in my life – not to mention it was for my artwork! So that all kind of greased the wheels for me to be able to believe in myself that I could maybe keep making work, and showing it, and some people might be into it. I went to art school when I was 18, and dropped out when I was 20, and all this stuff was happening sort of in tandem around that time, while I was simultaneously not going to class and faliling most of my courses, and leaving every weekend to spend time in New York. So whatever attention I did get for my zines, it pumped me up in the face of me doing so miserably in school, and I think gave me just enough ego to decide to drop out and think that I might be able to hack just doing things for myself.
Ok Heather, with these next series of questions, I will try to delve into your work as best as possible. So, your work often features powerful, mystical female figures that blend strength and vulnerability. What draws you to exploring womanhood in this way, and how do your personal experiences shape these depictions?
Heather: I’ve been making work centered around this woman, or these women, for a really long time now. She existed in my earliest zines, but she looked more like me in them, and was more literally self portraiture. Now, I still consider her self-portraiture, but she’s a bit more removed from me – more mythical, a bit more of an avatar and less literal, but I still use her essentially as my diary, to explore in kind of metaphorical ways different ways I’m feeling and being in a woman’s body over time. My work is all very much shaped by my personal experiences, that is my main source material. Making the work I make, and the self exploration it affords me, is extremely cathartic to me.
How has your relationship with your own femininity or identity evolved over the years, and how has that shaped the women you portray in your art?
Heather: Like most women I know, I go through my own somewhat unique progression of phases when it comes to feeling identified with looking or acting very femme, sometimes feeling very not aligned with that, my sex drive fluctuating and mutating in various ways, and also just generally sometimes feeling more or less in touch with my sense of self, and/or grounded in and identified with my body. It’s already been such a rollercoaster through so many different versions of these things in my life, and I’m 35. Some of it I think is just my personal journey that’s really baked into my existence regardless of anyone else and is inevitable, and some of it is due to what relationship I’ve been in or not in, my relationship to friends and family, to what’s going on in the world, all of that affects every aspect. Wherever I’m at on that journey is what I’m making work about, and the women in my work, like me, are shaped by the journey they have already been through, and carrying that with them and informed by everything that has come before, while they move through what they are experiencing in the moment.
Your art carries a sense of intimacy, like we’re peeking into your psyche. How do you decide how much of yourself to reveal, and where do you draw the line between private and public?
Heather: I definitely used to be more public. In one of my first zines, from when I was 19, there is a drawing of myself masturbating on the back with some ridiculous caption, I don’t even remember what it says, but it’s just so insanely vulnerable and teenage. I would never put that out into the world now, haha. I’m not sure why – I guess part of it is just getting older and having a bit more of an awareness of how people perceive you, whether that’s total strangers or like, my mom, haha. And in that, part of it is also the time we live in vs. what things were like almost 20 years ago now, just the way the internet is and the way everything lives on, and reverse image search. For example, I did some nude modeling after I dropped out of RISD to help pay the bills. At the time, I was 20, and was like, I’m using a fake name, nobody will ever see these photos. But then reverse image search was invented, so it’s only a matter of time I’m sure before you can just search all the images on the internet by someone’s face. Maybe you already can, I don’t know! But whenever that happens, all of those photos that are on random photographers’ websites from 16 years ago will just be out there again. So yeah, just the changing landscape of exposure and archiving I guess, has made me feel a little more private. I’m happy to explore all the sort of difficult things I want to explore and express in my work, through my women, but I have lost the desire to put my own body out there in quite the same way. But to answer your question, I am not sure where I draw the line, because I still do dabble in a little bit of oversharing at times, when I’m feeling spicy, or to feed the algorithm, or for whatever reason. My engagement was definitely higher online when I shared more of my personal life, so that has been a change, but I don’t really care.
You’ve transitioned from self-publishing zines to creating large-scale paintings and singular works on canvas. Can you tell me about what inspired this shift?
Heather: I will never stop self-publishing zines! I still make them. It’s less that I transitioned from one thing to another, and more that I expanded my practice significantly, which is something I always wanted to do. I just had to teach myself, and push myself. I never took a painting class in college, so wrangling these materials and that scale shift to try to tame them into working in tandem with what I had already developed – my drawing style, and the subject matter I care about – took a long time. And it was scary too, because I didn’t have unlimited funds to just fuck around and find out, experiment endlessly and make large stuff that sucks until it’s good. I did that a little, but it always felt really high stakes, literally just financially. So instead I kind of opted for this very slow build. First, I started teaching myself how to use a very small brush and ink to make my small works on paper, instead of a pen. Then, I slowly made larger and larger ink drawings with that brush, on bigger pieces of paper. It was still all just lines, one or two colors. Then I started messing around with trying to paint them in, and that took forever, to really figure out a way where I liked how it looked. Then I jumped to canvas, and everything I made literally was terrible for a couple of years. I went back to paper and learned how to paint more. Then I tackled canvas again. It took a really long time. I also don’t feel like I’ve got it all figured out yet, at all.
Have you ever faced a time when you doubted your path as an artist? If so, what pulled you through that uncertainty?
Heather: Of course, this happens to me at least a few times a year. I get some serious “post-partum” every single time I do a solo show; right afterwards I feel like I want to quit and change careers, it’s terrible. Only recently did I start hearing from other artists that this is true for them too, so I found some solace in that! The other time I doubt it is when I’m really strugging financially. And I don’t mean just like, a little broke, I mean going down to zero broke. This didnt used to bother me when I was a bit younger, because I was like, whatever, I have my whole life ahead of me, and I’ll just eat ramen and drink cheap beers, so who cares. Now that I’m 35, I’m like, I think I’m self employed for the long haul, I have no savings, I need to put some money aside because what if I need to get a root canal or something, fuck fuck fuck. And I spiral, and I feel like, I’m going to end up homeless all because I had a big enough ego to decide I could try to make a living as an artist, which almost nobody gets to do unless you are insanely lucky, or have some financial backing, or both. So yeah, the older I get, the more vulnerable I am in those moments, and I’m like, I should just go back to school and get some kind of useful training to have a job where at least there is some regular paycheck coming in, even if it isn’t much, because the financial instability can really fuck up my mental at times. Honestly, what pulls me through is some combination of like, crying to my partner and him gassing me up that everything’s gonna be okay, talking to friends and letting them try to lift me up too, and then hustling some odd jobs off craigslist and reminding myself that if I ever need to make a few extra bucks, I am industrious and I can figure that out. So yes, I doubt my path as an artist in terms of a viable option for me to live an alright life in our capitalist hellhole on a pretty regular basis. But in terms of doubting my path as an artist with regards to like, the kind of work I make, the way I make it, the way I show it, etc – like, not on a practical level – I never doubt that. So in a sense, maybe the latter is also something that pulls me through the former, too, I just love and care about what I do too much, and feel too lucky to be doing it in any sense to give up.
Your art has roots in the New York punk scene and DIY zine culture. How do those early influences still resonate in your work today, and what role do they play in your identity as an artist?
Heather: Photocopied zines and flyers were the first art I ever saw that wasn’t hanging on a wall in a museum or gallery, or in a professionally published fancy book, and I was immediately hooked on the concept that you could make stuff and churn it out in a cheap or free way, and spread it around. I remember looking through a box of zines that a friend had, all punk stuff like, how to ride trains, how to hitchhike, how to brew kombucha, there were issues of cometbus in there, stuff like that. I had never seen anything like that. And I was like, how crazy is it that I’m holding in my hands right now piles of photocopied pieces of paper that were drawn, copied, and sent out by people in Portland, the Bay, Minneapolis, etc, all punks and artists like myself who I had never met, but their work had made it this far, and was changing hands again. I was like, I want to do that, I want to make drawings and for it to just travel and go everywhere and be free or cheap. And that did end up happening, for years people have been texting me like, I was just at this random house in Tennessee and look one of your old zines is hanging in their kitchen! Or whatever. So much of that, and it’s so fulfilling. The way this still holds true in my work is that I still do make things like that, super cheap or free stuff that I just leave places or give away and let it travel. It’s really, really important to me. I guess another answer to this question is that I’m also just super aesthetically influenced by the work I discovered through punk/DIY channels, whether that’s legends like Gary Panter, or people I still call my friends today who are amazing artists that I met from going to punk shows back in the day. I’ve always been more interested in that kind of work aesthetically than what you would find in an art museum, generally speaking.
You’ve exhibited internationally and worked with a variety of mediums and scales. What’s been the most unexpected challenge or rewarding moment in expanding your practice globally?
Heather: The most rewarding moment for me so far was definitely getting to have a solo show at Commune, an amazing gallery and shop in Tokyo. Shuichi and Miyuki who run the gallery are so kind and have an amazing eye, so getting to do a show with them was a dream come true. Being in Tokyo was incredible for me – not only was that the first time I had traveled to Japan, which was really special, but also I have been so influenced throughout my life by various forms of Japanese art, so it was just an honor to show my own artwork there, and to explore the country as best I could in the couple of weeks I had there. Commune also partners with Neo Shibuya TV to show animated ads for my show on gigantic screens around Shibuya, including at the famous Shibuya crossing, which was an incredible and very surreal experience that I can never forget! When I was there I just went to the areas where the screens were and would wait for them to cycle through all the other ads on rotation, never sure when mine was going to pop up, and when it did it was a huge thrill every time. I am so grateful for that experience.
Sex, trauma, and self-acceptance are recurring themes in your work. How do you navigate the balance between personal storytelling and creating something universal that resonates with viewers?
Heather: I actually don’t navigate that balance at all. I just tell my personal stories. When people tell me that they do resonate, that is incredibly gratifying and healing. But I am never trying to speak for anyone else in my work, that’s why I really try to stress that description of my work as being personal and diaristic, I’m making work based on how I feel, what I’m going through. Inevitably, some people are going to relate to certain aspects of it, because I’m not that special! And I mean that in a good way. It feels good when they do.
With that in mind, how has making art changed the way you see or cope with your own struggles?
Heather: Well, making art literally makes me feel better, most of the time. Unless it’s a particularly challenging day in the studio, struggling through whatever I’m working on and not having it look the way I want it to, which definitely happens. But in terms of how making art has changed the way I cope with my own struggles, I would say I literally can turn to the process of art making in order to cope most of the time, which I am grateful for. It is definitely very therapeutic for me most of the time. Which isn’t to say that it’s not also difficult.
Looking ahead, what new directions or experiments are you excited to explore in your art? Are there mediums, themes, or collaborations you’re eager to dive into?
Heather: I’m excited to keep making ceramics, which I just started doing a couple of years ago. I’ve only done it three times, on a project basis – the first time, I was doing a residency in France and the works I made were for a solo show there; the second time, I worked with my friend Nora Normile who is an amazing artist and teaches ceramics at Rutgers, and she helped me make a few pieces for a solo presentation at NADA Miami in 2023. And the last time, I made some small figural incense burners. I actually really liked working as small as I did the last time, so I’m looking forward to playing around in 3 dimensions at that scale again.
You currently have a solo show at OLYMPIA, in New York , titled “New Strangeness Bloom”. What’s the story behind the title?
Heather: The title is from Diane di Prima’s “Loba”. A close friend gifted this book to me years ago and it was huge for me. I still open it in the studio often for inspiration.
Can you tell me about making figurative work vs making work without a figure in it? This was something new to you for this show right?
Heather: I had been wanting to try making work without a central woman figure for a while, but it felt impossible, so out of my comfort zone. I felt a real block about it, even though I really was dying to do it. Ali Rossi, who is the founder and director of Olympia, also felt like it was important for me to do this, and they really encouraged me to try to break through that block for this show. I don’t know if I would have done it at this time without them! They really helped push me over that finish line, and so there are two paintings that don’t have my lady in them in this show. I’m so so glad I ended up making them – they feel so intrinsic to the body of work and the show as a whole. And I love them on their own, too. I’m excited to keep exploring that direction.
Ok Heather, now to something totally different. In a parallel universe who would you be? and what would you be doing?
Heather: When I was in high school, before I had decided to go to art school and try to go in the direction I did, I liked the idea of being an English teacher, or a Linguistics professor. I don’t know if I was actually interested in those things, or if that was just what I was good at in school, so I thought it was what I should do for a job, haha. Now, when I think about what I would maybe do other than what I’m doing now, I think it might be nice to design for a brand that isn’t my own, so there’s a little less emotion and a bit more distance between myself and what I make, and keep my personal work separate. I do get to do this freelance for brands sometimes though, so I kind of have the best of both worlds in that regard already. And then even further out there, I do think I would enjoy being a therapist, or working as an art faciliator for people with special needs, or being a social worker.
What qualities do you find most important in the people you choose to spend time with?
Heather: Honesty, flexibility, humor.
Anybody you look up to?
Heather: I look up to a lot of people. I look up to a bunch of my friends. The most recent thing that comes to mind though, is that I went to an International Women’s Day dinner at Ludlow House, at which a good handful of very successful and very badass older female artists were present. I felt totally awestruck by them – they were all so gorgeous, so smart, so talented, and just like, raw as hell and full of energy and experience. I look up to all of them. I left there actually excited about aging. I felt like I saw an example of how it could be that got me so stoked.
What motivates you?
Heather: My innate compulsion to make things.
How would you describe a perfect day?
Heather: Well, there are two kinds of perfect days. One would be a sunny Spring day in New York, where I get up early, get to my studio, have a very productive day making work, and then leave in the evening to meet a friend for a martini outside somewhere, and then come home and get to hang out with my partner. The other would be a day out in the desert, get up early, stretch, eat a little mushrooms, draw all day indoors naked because it’s too hot out, and then have some beers outside watching the sunset, maybe drive down the hill to take a swim in Desert Hot Springs. If you know you know. It’s been a couple years since I had the second kind of perfect day, but fortunately, the first kind happens often enough that I can say I have a pretty good life.
Alright Heather, I always ask these two questions at the end of an interview. The first is. What’s your favorite movie(s) and why?
Heather: One movie that always comes to mind is “Before Night Falls”. It’s beautiful. I saw it in high school, and I actually have no idea how I found it. I think I may have just picked it up at the video rental store (I am that old) because of the cover looking sort of bold and artsy, and had no idea what I was getting into. It’s about the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, who I love. It’s really gorgeous.
The second is. What music are you currently listening to the most right now?
Heather: I’ve been listening to a ton of Beny Moré, which is nothing new, he’s an all time favorite for me. Also Bjork has been hitting lately, and a lot of Boards of Canada, and Sade.