Ato Malinda, also known as Alex Mawimbi is a multidisciplinary performance artist. Early life In 1981 she was born in Kenya, as the daughter of a Kenyan mother and an Ugandan father. She grew up in the Netherlands, but returned to Kenya as a teenager. After high school she moved to the USA where she studied Art History and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas. She had a rough childhood of not being able to satisfy her father's desires of becoming a doctor, as well as dealing with the shame that came with being bisexual in her community. In 2006 after moving to London for a little, her desire to pursue art was reawakened. Ato Malinda was previously known as Alex Mawimbi. That former name more and more came to stand for the memory of her abusive father and family. After the recent death of her wife's mother-in-law, and as a therapeutic gesture, she decided to bear that name no longer. Alex on the other hand is just as nice a name, she explains, and Mawimbi is the Swahili word for waves – a reference to the Indian Ocean that borders Kenya, the country on her ID. She subsequently moved back to Kenya where she works in multiple art disciplines: video art, performance art, installation, drawing, and painting. In addition, she works as a free-lance curator. Ato is one of a few performance artists in East Africa and is fighting hard for this relatively unknown art discipline to become more accepted. Many of Ato's performances are transformed into video art, with new layers and perspectives added to the original performance Career She studied art history and molecular biology at the University of Texas, in hopes of becoming a doctor. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Transart Institute in New York. Her work explores the facets of African identity and authenticity in mediums including performance, music, drawing and painting, installation, ceramics, and video. She focuses on gender and female sexuality, especially the stories of LGBTQ communities, and in the past has focused on the representation of African objects in Western museums. At the 2010 SUD triennial in Douala, Cameroon, Malinda performed a piece on the myth of the water goddess Mami Wata in the mangroves of the Douala's Wouri River. The performance, On fait ensemble, was both observed and recorded. In 2016, she was an awardee at