Shelly Mars

Recently, Mars has been Artist in Residence at NYC's Museum of Sex and has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts (2010), the Arcus Foundation, the Gill Foundation, and the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art.

Her solo shows include Bug Chasers (2005), Whiplash: Tales of a Tomboy (1999), which the New York Times called her "a female Candide", and Invasion from Mars (1997) working in venues across New York and beyond: Abrons Art Center, PS 122, New York Theatre Workshop, The Kitchen and the Grove Street Playhouse.

She performed in the Night of 100 Stars to raise money for the first New York International Fringe Festival (1997). Mars' autobiographical show, Sex on Mars, enjoyed a five-month run in Provincetown, MA in 2000.

After Virgin Machine's release in 1988, Mars was at the forefront of the emerging drag king culture in the US and appeared on such television shows as The Kids in the Hall, The Phil Donahue Show, The Montel Williams Show and The Sally Jesse Raphael Show and on HBO's Real Sex and Drag Kings. More recently, she has been featured in Comedy Central's Out There in Hollywood, A&E's Role Reversal and The Jamie Kennedy Experience on The WB.

Since starting performing in San Francisco in the early 1980s, Mars has done everything from improvisational stage work to voiceovers to movies and is best known for her monologues and gender-bending portrayals of various subcultures, with a focus on queer culture.

Shelly Mars (born 1960, Celina, Ohio) is a performance artist, actor and printmaker based in New York. She studied at University of California, Santa Cruz and has a B.F.A. in theater from the California Institute of the Arts. She also studied at American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco.