Leading up to our big 2-year anniversary show (April 3 - 26), we're going to share bios on each of the participating artists with a preview of one of their works for the show.

Today we feature HERA: Coming from a half-Pakistani, half-German background, therefore having been brought up half-Muslim and half-Catholic, Jasmin Siddiqui, aka HERA, knew quite a lot about ethical differences and complications even before elementary school. But she did not know how to deal with all the different perspectives until much later in her life when she discovered graffiti. Education-wise, the very shy girl who was born 1981 in Frankfurt, Germany, got a scholarship to spend her junior year at Venice High School in Los Angeles, a city she still visits once a year. She later went to study Graphic Design in Wiesbaden, Germany – back in 2000 a highly frequented meting point for international graffiti artists. By the time of her graduating with a diploma in 2007, Jasmin had already made a name for herself in the urban subculture she really loved, calling herself HERA after the highest Goddess in Greek mythology.

This was the necessary alter-ego, the matching super-hero-persona for a talented but thoroughly timid girl. In 2004 HERA met AKUT at a graffiti festival in Spain, and formed the crew Herakut, which still exists today and paints murals across the world. Her work has been featured in numerous books and magazines, blogs and television shows. It has been used as inspiration for countless tattoos and artwork by art students who have read her books “Herakut – The Perfect Merge” and “After The Laughter”. It amazes her, even today, that crazy twists of fate have allowed her, the torn little self-destructive kid, to share her thoughts with strangers. She believes that graffiti saved her life. And she teaches it to any child who needs a cure from feeling invisible.