Reba Maybury (born 1990) is a British-Pakistani artist, writer, lecturer, and professional dominatrix, sometimes known as Mistress Rebecca. Her work has drawn international attention for the way it tears open the economic-capitalist guts of both sex work and the commercial art world. She has exhibited internationally and famously describes men as her medium: much of the artwork is produced by male submissives under her control and direction. For kink-literate art audiences, she is the contemporary figure who makes session power into gallery labor—and who refuses to pretend the client is not also the unpaid studio assistant.
Early Life and Education
Maybury was born in Oxford in 1990 to a Pakistani mother and a Welsh father; she has a younger sister. In 2013 she graduated in Fashion History and Theory from the faculty of arts and design at Central Saint Martins in London. That fashion-theory training shows in how she treats costume, branding, and the visual economy of desire—Mistress Rebecca as both working pro-domme and conceptual brand. The dual identity matters: she is not an artist “playing” domination for a photo series, nor a scene-only Mistress who never enters the white cube. She moves money, labor, and images between those rooms on purpose.
Dominatrix Power as Art Method
A central focus of her practice is the tension between the power she wields as a dominatrix and the gendered dynamics of that interaction between men and women—the same imbalance that structures commercial sex. By subjecting male submissives to menial creative labor (for example, drawing cover art for a show in pencil), she converts her position as an object of male fantasy into concrete command over their time and product. The fantasy of the paid session is inverted: he pays or serves, and she keeps the work as art property. The point is not soft empowerment slogans; it is property, credit, and who leaves the room with the object.
In 2018 she received widespread unwanted tabloid attention for the apparent “political re-education” of typically conservative submissives. Maybury has written about the hypocrisy of men who are sexually drawn to dominant women yet deny those women’s rights outside the session—and about the vitriolic abuse she took in the right-wing press because of it. Her line: “Sex is about play and I want to play with politics too.” The moniker that stuck is political dominatrix. For BDSM readers that slogan is not a joke press sticker; it is an argument that scene power and public politics share a body, and that a Mistress who votes, teaches, and exhibits is allowed to use the dungeon as a critique machine.
Critics have compared her work to Toulouse-Lautrec’s compositions of sex workers caught in repose between acts of sexual labor. Maybury’s configuration is more provocative: here the clients—men—are the ones made to labor, often on paint-by-number kits whose finished product is gifted to Maybury as her property. In the ‘Used Men’ series (2021), as Jeppe Ugelvig describes it, the clothes of a presumably naked male submissive are strewn across the gallery floor—safely re-branded as artwork—while the naked body itself is left to the viewer’s imagination. Though her submissives are mutual, consenting collaborators, the joke is on them; in a spirit of reactionary feminism they do not receive credit. She lampoons art-world myths of solitary genius while illuminating discontinuous power imbalances in sex work. The approach is materialist: it insists on the labor—visible and invisible—in every paid session and every gallery object made under command. Consent is real; authorship credit is not equally shared. That asymmetry is the content, not a scandal to be cleaned up for polite feminism.
Teaching
Maybury teaches a class on critical thinking through Central Saint Martins’ MA Fashion course. She has also taught at HEAD Geneva, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and the Copenhagen Art Academy Sculpture School. Pro-domme practice and art-school pedagogy share her calendar—session economy and critique seminar as two rooms of the same politics. Students encounter domination not only as lifestyle branding but as a way to talk about labor, gender, and who gets paid for whose fantasy.
Solo and Duo Exhibitions
- From Paris With Love: The Book, Tiny Mutual Admiration Societies, Vienna, 2024
- From Paris With Love, Treize, Paris, 2022
- Faster than an erection, Museum of Contemporary Art (MACRO), Rome, 2021
- Moralists at a Costume Party, Huset for Kunst og Design, Holstebro, Denmark, 2021
- A-good-individual, schwarzescafé LUMA Westbau, Zürich, 2019
- My Deep Secret (with Will Sheldon), Arcadia Missa, London, 2018
- Fish Wives (with Claire Barrow), Paramount Ranch (with Shoot The Lobster), United States, 2016
The MACRO and LUMA dates matter for institutional reach: this is not only underground gallery flirtation with femdom aesthetics. Museum and kunsthalle walls have hosted the Mistress brand as serious contemporary practice, which is exactly the friction her work seeks—sex work’s economy inside institutions that still pretend the market for art is cleaner than the market for sessions.
Selected Group Exhibitions
- Hardcore, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2023
- SexKino Roland, NEXPO, Zürich, 2022
- In the Company of, Eden Eden / Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, 2022
- The Puppet Show, Centre d’art Contemporain, Geneva, 2022
- Isabella, Associazione Barriera, Turin, 2022
- The Baroness, Mimosa House, London, 2022
- sub/dominium curated by SoiL Thornton, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, 2021
- Put A Sock In It!, Sophie Tappinier, Vienna, 2021
- Exhibition For Your Apartment, Dawid Radziszewski Gallery, Warsaw, 2021
- In Excess, 3hD, Power Play, Berlin, 2021
- Witchhunt, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 2020
- The Monstrous Bouquet, Omstand, Arnhem, 2020
- Do You Love Me?, P.P.O.W, New York, 2019
- Paint, Also Known as Blood, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2019
- I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker, ICA, London, 2019
- Putting Out, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, 2018
- Prick Up Your Ears!, Karma International, Los Angeles, 2018
Group shows from Sadie Coles and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise to ICA’s Kathy Acker project and SoiL Thornton’s sub/dominium place her inside conversations about domination, excess, queer literary inheritance, and hardcore aesthetics—not only “sex work art” as a niche silo. The 2021–2022 cluster (Berlin, Geneva, Turin, London, Zürich) marks a period of dense international visibility for the political-dominatrix brand.
