I don’t even know you but I can tell you with absolute certainty that Juliana Huxtable, the fearless leader of artists in the LGBTQ community and the contemporary art scene in general, is much cooler than you.

But don’t worry because she is much cooler than all of us… combined. She is a photographer, DJ, poet, painter, model and undoubtedly an icon of trans artists everywhere. She was also the star of the New Museum’s 2015 triennial, “Surround Audience,” where Frank Benson’s 3-D scanned sculpture of her naked body (penis, breasts and all) stood in the middle of the exhibition. This was a huge deal because, as Benson stated, “It wasn’t until the opening of the Triennial that I realized how important the sculpture would be for the rest of the trans community. More than one person remarked that this was the first time they had seen a sculptural depiction of a body that they could relate to in a major museum.” Hooray for accurate transgender representation!

Juliana Huxtable was born in Bryan-College Station, Texas into a super Baptist southern family. When she was born, she was assigned a male gender and named Julian, which obviously didn’t work out because eventually she grew breasts and hips in a way that made adolescence even more of a sadistic hell hole than it already is. On top of this, her parents got divorced and her mother started beating her. So Juliana went to Bard College and after graduation settled in New York City, where she finally made her transition. In order to support herself there, Juliana DJ’d, made edibles and did an assortment of odd jobs, including (ironically) catering for the New Museum Spring Gala four years before she would be the star of their Triennial. You could say it was destiny.