Empress Trash, also known by her given name Drea Jay, is a mixed-media artist working across trash, glitch, AI and animation with a punk, DIY sensibility. Raised on 1980s 8-bit video games and Photoshop images made in her teens, she earned a BFA in Painting, Drawing and Animation/Design from the University of Iowa in 2014 before moving to the Bay Area.
In the Bay Area she worked alongside other artists as a member of the Firehouse Art Collective and was included in a show of Ai Weiwei's on Alcatraz. She had adopted the name Empress Trash before entering crypto art, while living in a house near Oakland's I-80/580 interchange where people dumped trash nearby and she hosted large art parties. Working with the glitch tool PhotoMosh, she found that some collectors dismissed the results as low effort, a reaction that helped spur the Trash Art movement she joined on entering the crypto art scene in 2021. ROBNESS later credited her, alongside Max Capacity, as one of the artists leading the #TezTrash movement's charge on Tezos.
