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Jackie Liu (b. 2003, Massachusetts) is a disabled and autistic artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received a BA in Art Practice, minor in Philosophy, and minor in Environmental Justice from Stanford University in 2025. She makes silly paintings with serious intent: resistance, healing, survival. Living with Long Covid and an alphabet soup of mental illnesses, she confronts trauma with irreverence, making art that both visually depicts joy and viscerally feels joyful to create. With oil paint layered over vibrant acrylic underpaintings, her intimately detailed portraits of her beloveds – her chosen family – capture fleeting blissful memories and suspend them in a medium of painstaking slowness, imparting gravity and longevity upon seemingly trivial moments of levity. Seeking to revive presence and connection in an increasingly alienating, commodified, and digitized world, she wields paintbrush as wand to conjure wonder and gratitude for the small pockets of magic in life.
Her paintings have been exhibited at the de Young Museum (San Francisco, CA); the Museum of Northern California Art (Chico, CA); Kearny Street Workshop (San Francisco, CA); SOMArts (San Francisco, CA); the San Francisco Filipino Cultural Center (San Francisco, CA); the Debbie Allen Dance Academy (Los Angeles, CA); Bedford Gallery (Walnut Creek, CA); Epperson Gallery (Crockett, CA); Good Mother Studio (Oakland, CA); Transmission Gallery (Oakland, CA); the Stanford Art Gallery (Stanford, CA); Fountain Street Gallery (Boston, MA); the Worcester Center for Crafts (Worcester, MA); and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington, DC).
In 2025, she was granted the Raina Giese Award in Painting and the J.E. Wallace Sterling Award for Scholastic Achievement by Stanford University, awarded a merit-based full fellowship by Vermont Studio Center, shortlisted for the Winsor & Newton International Art Prize, and longlisted for Jackson’s Art Prize. Her work has been featured by the official @instagram account and appeared in The New York Times, and she has been profiled by Artwork Archive and Character Media.