Monica Trinidad

Chicago, IL, United States

Monica Trinidad (they/she) is a queer Latine visual artist and cultural strategist working at the intersections of art and social change. A lifelong Chicagoan, Monica has created zines, graphics, mixed media posters, and other visual art highlighting youth-led and intersectional grassroots organizing work in Chicago and nationally. Her creative practice invites individuals to reimagine a better and more just world centered around experimentation, interdependence, abundance over scarcity, process over product, and following the guidance and leadership of directly-impacted communities. In addition to their work at Justseeds, Monica is a founding member of Brown and Proud Press and For the People Artists Collective, two Chicago-based collectives experimenting with the power of cultural organizing, storytelling, and dominant narrative disruption. Monica also launched the Lit Review Podcast with Assata’s Daughter’s co-founder Page May as a supplemental political education resource geared towards organizers and activists. Monica holds a Bachelor's Degree in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was awarded the Civic Engagement, Community Service, and Community Organizing (CESCO) award. Her visual art has been exhibited at the National Museum of Mexican Art, DuSable Museum, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Hairpin Arts Center, and Sullivan Galleries, and her work has been covered in Hyperallergic, NewCity, Art21, Chicago Reader, Chicago Tribune, and other additional local media. Monica was named one of Windy City Times’ 30 Under 30 and honored by Women and Femmes to Celebrate in 2015, a community-gifted honor started by Project NIA and given to inspiring organizers and carried forward by past honorees. When Monica isn’t making visual art in collaboration with organizations, curating a new art poster series, or creating spaces for artists to network and support each other, she’s running communications for Third Wave Fund, a by-and-for national community fund resourcing gender justice movements with rapid response and multi-year financial support. You can find Monica’s most notable visual artwork on the cover of Mariame Kaba's New York Times bestseller We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, available everywhere books are sold—buy local!

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