ROSHANA RUBIN MAYHEW

Roshana Rubin Mayhew is a transdisciplinary artist and musician. Over the last 20 years, Roshana’s work has investigated queer practices and methodologies. Queer in that they reach for mutability, nuance, and multiplicity; resisting fixity, linearity, and essentialisation in hope of more expansive senses of being and belonging. Whether through riffing and the immanent topological systems it proposes, sensorial knowledge and affective charge, breath and other fluid states, quantum thinking with its queerer temporalities and interconnectedness, collaboration including visiting the “inanimate”, portals and utopian worlding, this practice is often saturated in the colour blue: longing, possibility, fluctuating, pleasure.

Roshana is presently focused on wrestling-with a bodyweight of clay, practice-based research that is steeped in the poetics of the Blues – dissonance, rhythmic feel, and 12-bar topologies. Drawing from these as queer practices of resistance, this investigates the artistic capacity to hold the weighty – the adverse, oppressive, traumatic, or present shaped by the heavy repeating imprints of ongoing past – in a way that instils malleability and openness. With a focus on performance, this is investigated through the palpable charge of liveness and its ability to gather space that holds malleably, through resonance rather than representation. A resonance that begins to articulate the affective capacity of artwork – affective as both moving and remaking.

Roshana is currently a PhD researcher at the Royal College of Art, articulating an emergent queer methodology of leaning in , funded by London Arts & Humanities Partnership (2020-2026), lecturing at Istituto Europeo di Design Milan, and living in London.

Roshana (b. 1987, Manchester, UK) grew up across Europe, travelling and at times performing with contemporary dance company Le Grand Jeu. Directed by Louis Ziegler with dancers including Simone Forti and Julyen Hamilton, this deeply shaped ongoing interest in embodied knowledge and improvisation. Roshana trained in classical music and jazz at Chetham’s School of Music, specialising in clarinet and piano, and made possible by a full financial aid award. In 2005, two live art commissions were received from Method Lab (greenroom) and Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (Nuffield Theatre), leading to the works Microwaveable Moments and A Melting Moment No.1. Throughout the following decade, Roshana shifted into photography. Alongside developing this practice, Roshana photographed live art, contemporary performance, and dance, working with festivals and venues across the UK & Ireland, including on works by Ron Athey, Martin O’Brien, Eggs Collective, and Sophie Willan. From 2012-2014, Roshana collaborated with Ellie Harrison on The Grief Series, producing a multimedia photographic installation that toured through empty houses across the UK, with partners including b-side Arts Festival (Portland) and funded by Arts Council England.

Roshana was named a rising star by The Independent in 2012, following selection for World Event Young Artists (Lakeside Arts Centre) and Culture Cloud (New Art Exchange) with the work The Breath Collection. An MA in Photography was completed at the London College of Communication (UAL) in 2015, during which practice took a sculptural turn. For the final installation, Metacrush, Roshana was awarded a year-long studio residency from Artquest/ACAVA, as well as a mentorship grant from Metro Imaging. In 2014, Roshana co-formed art + party collective GJRL, which ran queer-lesbian club night Lemon Juice to support the creation of new works. This continued as Beyond Beyond, an artistic duo with Giulia Astesani, which explored queering for possible utopias. Beyond Beyond was based between Milan and London. Their solo exhibition Anomalies in the Flux of Normal Things opened at Nowhere Gallery Milan in 2018, with works later featured in MiArt and Milano Art Week, Strange Perfume at South London Gallery, and published in Modern Queer Poets (Pilot Press:2020).

Roshana’s practice-based PhD at the Royal College of Art (2020–2026) brought the research back into performance and sound. In 2020, Roshana was invited to join Grand Re Union, a year-long discursive platform exploring the political potential of choreography as a way to think, act, and perceive reality. This was hosted online by Counterpulse San Francisco and Art Stations Foundations Poznan, gathering 100 international artists and thinkers, including Lisa Nelson, Jack Halberstam, and Michael Marder. Roshana’s work Feeling the Blues was published in Queereal Secretions: Artistic Research as Exquisite Practice (eds. Henry Rogers & Nicky Coutts) in 2023. And in 2025, was selected for Whitechapel Gallery’s London Open Live, developed and performed as a complete three-movement work across the three months of the season.