Lady K

Lady K, whose real name is Jessica Balota, is a French visual artist and graffiti writer born in 1978 in Le Blanc-Mesnil, Seine-Saint-Denis. Her practice focuses on lettering.

Lady K wrote her first tags as a teenager and was painting in the street by the late 1990s. Alongside this, she studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, graduating in 2007, then at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Lady K is a member of the international collective 156 All Starz. The Grand Palais presented her in 2009 in its exhibition devoted to tagging, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York exhibited her in 2015 for the collective's thirtieth anniversary. She is also known for her street actions filmed in broad daylight, in which she tags in high heels and vintage outfits.

Lady K's lettering plays block letters and wild style against English calligraphy. Around 2013, mathematical formulas entered her compositions. She also repairs, in the street, the posters against femicide that have been torn down or covered over.