Born in the San Joaquin Valley of California, Nao Bustamante had a typical Mexican American, working-class and Catholic upbringing. While attending California State University, Fresno and studying economics and pre-law, dance classes led her to San Francisco’s queer nightlife. Though she entered the art world in the 1980s with no formal training, her experience in the Bay Area made her an intergenerational icon for queer communities and their subcultures. By 2001, she had earned a joint BFA/MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute, and in 2020, she received an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the same institution.

In 1992, N. Bustamante participated in a series of artworks critiquing the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the conquest of the Americas by Europeans who claimed to have discovered the “New World”. Her canonical performance, Indigurrito, satirically remixed Indigeneity with the burrito as a stereotypical and phallic symbol of Mexican culture. Dressed as a burlesque dancer named Rosa while wearing a burrito strapped to her groin, she asked White men in the audience to take a bite of her burrito to absolve themselves of 500 years of guilt. That same year, she performed as Rosa the exhibitionist on The Joan Rivers Show for her video piece Rosa Does Joan (1992). Her practice makes use of popular new media or technology, simultaneously critiquing it while utilising it as a creative platform. In 2010, she exemplified this approach when she became a contestant on Bravo’s reality show Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, where she competed as a vulnerable performance artist for four weeks on national television.

N. Bustamante’s performances encompass both endurance pieces and research-intensive projects where embodied experience is foregrounded. The former include Sans Gravity (1993–2003), America, the Beautiful (2002) and Given Over to Want (2007–2019). In America, the Beautiful, she transforms her body with clear packing tape into the blonde sex-kitten so ubiquitous to American media. Cartoonishly and precariously, she climbs to the top of the ladder, literally and figuratively, in a distortion of idealised beauty. Her research-based performances include The Chain South (1997), Soldadera (2015) and BLOOM (2021). In the latter, she redesigned the vaginal speculum to disarm it from its violent history. Based on a flower that slowly opens, BLOOM is a feminist response to the original 1846 design by James Marion Sims, who earned his success in the United States by experimenting on enslaved women without proper care. In 2021, N. Bustamante presented a culmination of this research-based project at Artpace San Antonio, reimagining in the gallery another future for gynaecology.

Dubbed “the vulnerability artist” by theorist José Esteban Muñoz, N. Bustamante centres her body as source of image, narrative and emotion in her work. Her practice combines the presentation of an authentic vulnerability and a conscious act of artifice through her embodied self. As J. E. Muñoz wrote, “Bustamante’s performance practice engages and re-imagines what has been history of violence, degradation, and compulsory performance” (“The Vulnerability Artist”, p. 194).