Lena Chen (San Francisco, 1987) is a Chinese American writer and artist working across performance and social practice. Named “Best Emerging Talent” at the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image (Frankfurt), she has exhibited and performed at Transmediale (Berlin), Färgfabriken (Stockholm), Baltimore Museum of Art,  Museum of Modern Art (Antwerp), and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin). She has been awarded grants and residencies from the Office of Public Art (Pittsburgh), INVERSE Performance Art Festival (Bentonville), Burning Man Global Arts Fund (San Francisco), Civic Media Lab (Dnipro, Ukraine), Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (Pittsburgh), and Women’s Media Center (Washington, D.C.). Chen has given talks at Oxford, Yale, Stanford, and SXSW. As a member of Maternal Fantasies, she is a recipient of the Arthur Boskamp Foundation Advancement Award 2019/2020. Using mythology to create alternative networks of care and platforms for self-representation, Chen has produced participatory projects with trauma survivors, sex workers, and abortion providers. Her work frequently references spatial histories and has taken place in former butcher shops, prisons, nightclubs, harbors, and cemeteries. She earned a B.A. in sociology from Harvard University and is currently pursuing a MFA at Carnegie Mellon School of Art, where she holds the Lea Simonds Fellowship.