Tara Asgar is a Bangladeshi-born trans artist, writer, and educator whose work moves fluidly across performance, video, text, and public scholarship. Based in Brooklyn, New York, her interdisciplinary practice explores the aesthetics and politics of queer life, migration, and diasporic identity, centering the lived experiences of being trans, Muslim, brown, and in exile.

Raised in Dhaka, Asgar’s early performances boldly challenged dominant gender norms and public morality in Bangladesh. Following the brutal murders of LGBTQ+ activists Xulhaz Mannan and Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy in 2016, both close to her, she was forced to flee the country under threat. That same year, she received the Mellon Foundation’s Artist Protection Fund Fellowship, which enabled her relocation to the United States and the continuation of her work in exile.

Tara holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Dhaka and a Master of Fine Arts in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work blends critical theory with lived experience, often invoking refusal, embodied resistance, and community care as tools for navigating and disrupting colonial, neoliberal, and patriarchal systems.

Asgar’s performances and visual works have been exhibited across South Asia and North America, including the Dhaka Art Summit, South Asia Institute (Chicago), Kolkata International Performance Art Festival, Queens Museum, Onsite Gallery, Trinity Square Video, and the Asian Art Initiative. Her writings on art, gender, and dissent have appeared in The Daily Star, Dhaka Tribune, New Age, Nagorik.net, and Varta Trust. She was previously interviewed by Hyperallergic and the Daily Beast and continues to build a bilingual archive of essays and creative writing on queer South Asian futures.

As an educator, she has taught art, gender studies, and critical race theory at institutions including The New School and Pace University. Her pedagogy draws from queer theory, decolonial critique, and performance studies, fostering classrooms where minoritized students and experimental forms are centered.

At the heart of Asgar’s work is the conviction that survival is not simply endurance, but a practice of collective imagination, generational memory, and radical kinship. Her art insists on dreaming and building alternative futures, even and especially, in the aftermath of loss.