LJ Roberts is an artist and writer who creates large-scale textile installations, intricate embroideries, artist books, collages and mixed-media sculptures. Their work illuminates oft-erased and unacknowledged queer and trans narratives, people, and places. The artist creates conceptual and geographical maps of queer life of the past, present and future through material deviance and re-imaging craft practices. LJ’s work has been shown in exhibitions at Barbican Centre, Smithsonian AmericanArt Museum (Renwick Gallery), The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, The 8th Floor, Museum of Arts and Design, Vox Populi, Smack Mellon, Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Orange County Museum of Art, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Powerhouse Museum, FLAG Art Foundation, National Academy of Design, The Museum of the City of New York, The Oakland Museum of California, The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at The University of Southern California, and The Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

LJ’s first New York City solo exhibtion, Carry You With Me: Ten Years of Portraits opened at Pioneer Works in 2021 and traveled to Cantor Center for the Arts at Stanford University in 2022.

LJ has been the past recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, the Fountainhead Fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University, and residencies at IASPIS (International Artists' Studio Program in Sweden--Stockholm), Ox-Bow School of Art, ACRE, The Textile Arts Center, The Bag Factory in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY. LJ is currently the 2023-2024 halley k. harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld Artist-in-Residence at Bowdoin College.

In 2015, LJ was one of nine recipients of The White House Champions of Change Award for LGBTQI artists from President Barack Obama. They also received the 2019 President's Award for Art and Activism from the Women's Caucus for Art. Recently the artist was a recipient of BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize and the Arthur and Sheila Prensky Island Press Fellowship at the Sam Fox School of Art, Washington University (St. Louis).

Institutional Collections include: Brooklyn Museum, National Portrait Gallery, The Renwick Gallery, and the Archives of American Art, all at the Smithsonian Institution; Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Leslie Lohman Museum, Oakland Museum of American Art and the Tretter Collection at University of Minnesota.

LJ lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island and teaches at Parsons School of Design.

LJ Roberts is represented by Hales, London and New York.