livepainting at Kalayaan SF – Philippine “independence day”
Visuals, Bedazzlement, & Media Support
Nicole Gervacio is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California – occupied Huichin. As a cultural producer, her work integrates various methods and mediums – from visual work to movement, video to written word. She is inspired by the body, memory, destruction and deterioration, permanence versus impermanence and is driven by the fear of forgetting. Nicole received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in 2011 and has exhibited her work with organizations including Urban X Indigenous, The Flight Deck, Rock Paper Scissors Collective, and is in association with the Filipino American Artist Directory.
Nicole has collaborated with various organizations and communities throughout the bay area. Some of the roles she has served include artist coordinator for Her Resilience, leading 13 artists in a public art project that honored various stories and voices of women and investigated the state of violence women face in Oakland, lead artist of People of Coloring’s asian and pacific coloring book Awakened Ancestors // Borrowed Futures: Navigating Our Distinct Paths, and most recently community engagement and media support with TheaterFirst, a theater company which seeks to revolutionize the intersection of audience, artist, and activism. Nicole currently works with The People’s Conservatory teaching art and culture production to students from kindergarten to high school. Originating at Roses in Concrete, she now teaches in private, public, charter schools throughout the East Bay. The People’s Conservatory trains young art scholars to explore, create, and envision through artistic endeavors that can promote positive social change.
Throughout her career as an artist, Nicole has taught dance classes, original choreography, and movement workshops to support and inspire the individual as well as the collective. Her experience has culminated to her most recent work Expanding Through Dance at Radically Fit, a body positive community gym for all queer, trans, POC, big bodied and fat identified folx and their allies, regardless of experience or ability.
Her words, poetry, and visual art have been published in Ano Ba Zines, Pilipinx Radical Imagination Reader, The South Seattle Emerald, Mills Quarterly, and a self-produced zine about living in the pilipinx diaspora titled opposite sides of an ocean.
In 2016, she became involved in the grassroots adult freedom school Liberation Spring and co-founded the collaborative cultural production team We Rise Production. Both continue to deepen and support her work as an artist and activist.