Monique Jenkinson is a multifaceted performing artist. Her work, which spans the realms of theater, dance, drag, and performance art, has been called "hilarious" with an "intellectual spark" and "enough to make a girl want to revisit her Susan Sontag" (SF Chronicle). Monique takes delight in visceral explorations of the glamorous and the feminine; the uncanny and the tragic; the linguistic and the sartorial; the fanciful and the frightening.   In her latest solo, Crying in Public she validates inappropriate displays of feminine emotion by singing Björk in the voice of Judy Garland, bungee jumping from a 20-foot ladder, flinging 10-pound sandbags through puddles of water, and vogueing, soaking-wet, to Vivaldi's Stabat Mater .

Over the past few years, Monique's drag queen alter ego, Fauxnique, has become a major attraction at Trannyshack, the inspired weekly drag show at San Francisco's Stud bar. Fauxnique's performances are products of exuberant fancy and of artistic rigor, firmly rooted in her ballet background. Club-going audiences have seen her posing through artificial seasons dressed in clothes made of fashion magazine pages, teetering en pointe as a punky black swan, and shot through with arrows as a ghoulish 1930s chorine-cum-St. Sebastian. In 2003, Fauxnique became the first female drag queen, or faux queen , to be crowned Miss Trannyshack (see the Bay Guardian's Best of the Bay '04: Best Sign of Gender Equality ). Fauxnique has performed at Reykjavik, Iceland's Gay Pride, Amsterdam's Supperclub, London's Too2Much and Horsemeat Disco, San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and most recently at the Coachella music festival with her art rock hero David J. She appears in the documentaries Blood, Sweat and Glitter and Filthy Gorgeous: the Trannyshack Story , and channels Sandra Bernhard in Peaches Christ: Spin the Bottle . She also portrayed Latina drag queen Dulce de Leche in Enrique Urueta's The Danger of Bleeding Brown at the 2006 Bay Area Playwrights' Festival and directed A More Perfect Union: Fashion Uprising at SF's de Young Museum, which brought the work of couturier Mr. David into the context of Vivienne Westwood's 34 Years of Fashion . Fauxnique has created more than 50 short pieces over the last three years, and continues to deliver shimmering new creations to the Trannyshack stage on a near-weekly basis.

Monique spent five years as the co-director (with actor Kevin Clarke) of the performance duo Hagen & Simone. Together they created Future Perfect , a witty theatrical coupling of Strunk and White's grammar bible The Elements of Style and Diana Vreeland's memos to her staff at Vogue. Their last piece The Excused , used a crowd of 23 people to expose the space between etiquette, common courtesy and ethics.