Emma Sulkowicz

Emma Sulkowicz (born October 3, 1992) is best known as a political activist and performance artist.

In April 2013, Sulkowicz filed a complaint with Columbia alleging that they had been raped by another Columbia student, Paul Nungesser, on August 27, 2012.

Nungesser was found 'not responsible' by a university inquiry.

While still a college student, Sulkowicz developed a national reputation with the performance artwork Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) (2014–2015).

In May 2014, Sulkowicz filed a report against Nungesser with the New York Police Department (NYPD).

After the district attorney's office interviewed Sulkowicz and Nungesser and found insufficient grounds for reasonable suspicion, Sulkowicz declined to pursue criminal charges further, saying that NYPD officers were dismissive and had mistreated Sulkowicz.

Sulkowicz subsequently focused their senior thesis on a work of performance art entitled Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight).

The performance and the allegations received considerable media attention, with Sulkowicz becoming known as "Mattress Girl".

Nungesser denied Sulkowicz's allegations of rape, citing as evidence friendly messages from Sulkowicz in the weeks following the alleged attack.

A motivating trigger for Sulkowicz's activism was her discovery that Columbia had dismissed sexual assault charges against Nungesser by two other Columbia undergraduates.

A second motivating factor was her sense that Columbia and the NYPD had dismissed the allegations without enough of a serious inquiry.

Sulkowicz and other students came together to demand change and they “built the most effective, organized anti-rape movement since the late ’70s.”

Sulkowicz created Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) in the summer of 2014 as a senior thesis while at Yale University Summer School of Art and Music.

This performance artwork was in protest against campus sexual assault and the university's handling of Sulkowicz's allegation that a fellow student at Columbia University anally raped them.

The university cleared the student of responsibility, and the district attorney's office declined to pursue criminal charges, citing lack of reasonable suspicion.

Sulkowicz's first effort was a video of themself dismantling a bed, accompanied by the audio of them filing the police report, which they had recorded on a cellphone.

The mattress later became the sole focus of the piece.

Sulkowicz told New York magazine:"I thought about how ... the mattress represents a private place where a lot of your intimate life happens; and how I have brought my life out in front for the public to see; and the act of bringing something private and intimate out into the public mirrors the way my life has been. Also the mattress as a burden, because of what has happened there, that has turned my own relationship with my bed into something fraught."

The 50 lb, dark-blue, extra-long twin mattress used in the performance art piece is of the kind Columbia places in its dorms, similar to the one on which they say they were raped.

Sulkowicz spent the summer of 2014 creating the rules of engagement: written on the walls of their studio in the university's Watson Hall, these stated that Sulkowicz must carry the mattress whenever they were on university property; that it must remain on campus even when Sulkowicz was not there; and that Sulkowicz was not allowed to ask for help in carrying it, but could accept if help was offered.

In September that year they began carrying it on campus, which they said was a physically painful experience.

During a protest organized by the student group No Red Tape on Oct. 29, 2014, hundreds of Columbia students stacked 28 mattresses on Columbia's president Lee Bollinger's doorstep.

The mattresses symbolized the 28 sexual assault complaints in Columbia's Title IX case, reported New York magazine.

The Columbia student group Student Worker Solidarity, who booked the space for No Red Tape, would be charged $1500 for the removal of the mattresses on behalf of the university.

They then attended Columbia University, where they fenced sabre for the Columbia University Lions fencing team, and obtained a degree in visual arts in 2015.

Sulkowicz is non-binary and uses both she/her and they/them pronouns.

In April 2015, Nungesser filed a Title IX gender discrimination lawsuit against Columbia, its board of trustees, its president Lee Bollinger, and Sulkowicz's supervising art professor Jon Kessler, alleging that they had facilitated gender-based harassment by allowing the art project to proceed.

Federal District Court Judge Gregory H. Woods dismissed the lawsuit but allowed Nungesser to refile an amended suit; the refiled complaint was also dismissed, but Columbia settled the case under undisclosed terms after Nungesser's attorney began the process of appealing the dismissal.

Their initial performance piece consisted of Sulkowicz carrying a mattress wherever they went on campus during their final year as an undergraduate at Columbia University.

The work was a protest against campus sexual assault and the university's handling of the sexual assault case, in which it had cleared the accused of responsibility.

Sulkowicz's final thesis show, the week before graduation in May 2015, included depictions of a naked man with an obscenity and a couple having sex, printed onto a New York Times article about the student they accused.

Sulkowicz said that the images were cartoons, and asked: "what are the functions of cartoons? Do they depict the people themselves (a feat which, if you've done enough reading on art theory, you will realize is impossible), or do they illustrate the stories that have circulated about a person?"

This work was later shown under the title Newspaper Bodies (Look, Mom, I'm on the Front Page!) as part of a group exhibition at the Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, New York.

On June 3, 2015, Sulkowicz, working with artist Ted Lawson, released Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol ("This is not a rape"), an eight-minute video of Sulkowicz having sex with an anonymous actor in a Columbia dorm room.

The title of the piece is a reference to the caption in René Magritte's The Treachery of Images: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe".

Introductory text by Sulkowicz stresses that the sex was consensual throughout, though toward the end it portrays resistance, violence and force.

In 2019, she said she had stopped making art and began a master's program in traditional Chinese medicine.

Sulkowicz is the child of Sandra Leong and Kerry Sulkowicz, who are both psychiatrists in Manhattan.

Sulkowicz is of Chinese, Japanese, and Jewish descent.

Sulkowicz attended the Dalton School on the Upper East Side, where they were an A student and competitive fencer.