Nicole Garneau was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1970. She has a background in theater and is currently a performance artist based in Chicago.

She earned a BA in Theater from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MA in Interdisciplinary Art from Columbia College Chicago. In 1993-94 Nicole worked as an actor in the Theatre of Moscow South-West, performing in Russian. In Chicago, she has built an interdisciplinary performance practice of site-specific, movement-based solo and collaborative performance art that often addresses a political issue; text-based works; percussive music; singing; and gender performance.

Since 1995, Nicole has worked closely with Insight Arts, an arts organization located in the East Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago that is dedicated to increasing access to cultural work that promotes social justice and defends human rights. In 1998 she helped found Big Smith Performance ensemble, a group that presented percussive music and interdisciplinary performance around the Midwest and internationally until 2005. She has performed with Lucky Plush Productions/Walkabout Theater and Breakbone Dance Company. In 2005, she created the durational project HEAT:05, in which she performed every day for a year in order to mark 10 years since the 1995 Chicago heat wave. In April 2006, documentation of HEAT:05 was presented by Vespine Gallery with a series of accompanying public dialogues. She is currently a member of the Chicago-based gender performance troupe A Sordid Collective.

Nicole’s work is informed by feminism; struggle against white supremacy; the politics of the female body; sexuality; spirituality; violence against women and children; the prison-industrial complex; the death penalty; her experiences living and working in Moscow, Russia; and the 1995 Chicago heat wave disaster. She is interested in creating performance and visual art work that is directly political, critically conscious, and community building. She works in the Center for Community Arts Partnerships and is adjunct faculty at Columbia College Chicago.