Kat Simmers is a trans woman, artist, author, and muralist working in comic media and street art to create community connections through visual media. Born and raised in a special kind of nowhere - Bashaw, Alberta (pop. 830) - Simmers experienced firsthand the intersection of queer and rural life.
Co-Author & illustrator of the graphic novel series Pass Me By, her work connects communities to unseen parts of their histories and challenges the public to see beyond the everyday. Her murals and graphic novels engage the public in conversations about queer identity, mental health and what happens to the stories you never tell.
Kat pushes themselves to emphasize human relationships over the traditional narrative, challenging roles that you would see in everyday storytelling. The work of Kat Simmers explores identity and relationships in the context of gender, queerness, subjectivity, and relativity, with character identities emerging not through definable traits but through relationships with other characters, and through the context of the observer.
As a queer/trans artist living with Bi-polar disorder (type 1) it’s Simmers’ mission to create powerful, knowledgeable interpretations of these and other experiences, which so many go through without representation. Her public works populate the Treaty 6 & 7 region in Mohkinstsis (the city of Calgary), the city of Red Deer, and the town of Bashaw.
Kat Simmers was selected as BUMP Festival's 2024 Pride Mural artist, a project that took place within the festival in partnership with Blakes & Calgary Queer Arts Society. You can read more about this project here.