Women in NFTs
When we look back at the early years of NFT art, it is easy to remember the names that became the biggest headlines.
Beeple. CryptoPunks. Bored Ape Yacht Club.
But the story was much bigger than that.
Women were there too.
They were creating digital art, experimenting with generative systems, building communities, collecting, curating and finding new ways to share their work. Some had already been working digitally for years before NFTs came along. Others discovered the technology and saw in it a new way of putting their work directly in front of an audience.
Krista Kim was one of the artists who became closely associated with this early period. Her work explored the relationship between art, technology and digital space, and her Mars House became one of the most talked-about NFT artworks of 2021.
Itzel Yard, known as IX Shells, was creating generative art using code. In 2021, her work Dreaming at Dusk sold for more than $2 million, bringing considerable attention to both her work and the possibilities of generative art.
Blake Kathryn was another artist whose distinctive digital style became closely associated with the NFT boom. Her colourful, surreal worlds found a large audience during a time when digital artists were suddenly being discovered by collectors from around the world.
And then there was Flower Girls.
Created by artist and illustrator Varvara Alay, Flower Girls was launched in 2021 as a collection of 10,000 NFTs featuring colourful, hand-drawn female characters. Each Flower Girl was created from hundreds of illustrated elements, giving the collection a distinctly artistic feel rather than simply treating the NFT as a profile picture. (OpenSea)
There was also something else happening with Flower Girls.
Alay used the project to support children's charities and to collect NFT art created by children. In the first months after its launch, the project raised significant funds for children's causes and collected work from young artists. (Creative Bloq)
Flower Girls became one of the recognisable women-led projects of the NFT boom, but it also reflected something that was happening more broadly.
Women were not simply entering an existing space.
They were creating their own spaces within it.
Another important figure was Betty, the co-founder of Deadfellaz, who created the project with her partner Psych.
Deadfellaz launched in August 2021 with 10,000 undead characters. What made it particularly interesting was its approach to identity. Betty felt that many of the PFP projects appearing at the time did not offer the kind of representation she was looking for. Instead, Deadfellaz was designed to be gender-neutral, allowing people to find a character they could identify with regardless of gender.
Betty and Psych initially remained anonymous, with Betty later revealing her identity at VeeCon in 2022. Before Deadfellaz, Betty had worked in creative production and community organising, including work focused on creating safe spaces for women and gender-diverse people. (Boardroom)
This is an important part of the story because Deadfellaz was about more than the artwork itself.
It was about digital identity.
It was about community.
And it was about creating a space where people could represent themselves in a way that did not fit neatly into the traditional categories of male and female.
The project launched during the extraordinary PFP boom of 2021 and sold out quickly. Over time, Deadfellaz developed into a much larger creative project, with its characters being used across digital spaces, games, events and other forms of media.
Claire Silver was another important artist in the early NFT and AI art movement. She had been involved in the NFT space since 2017 and began experimenting with AI-generated imagery well before text-to-image AI became part of everyday conversation. Her first NFT project, Genesis, was minted in 2020 and brought together AI-generated images to create a visual narrative. (Claire Silver)
What makes Silver's story particularly interesting is the way she sits between several different parts of the digital art movement. She was an early NFT artist, an early adopter of AI as a creative tool and a collector as well as a creator. Her work became a conversation about what happens when an artist and a machine work together, rather than simply treating AI as a replacement for the artist. Her work has since been exhibited through institutions including Sotheby's and Christie's and is held in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Looking back now, Claire Silver's work feels particularly relevant because she was exploring questions about AI and creativity before they became the huge cultural conversation they are today. She was already asking where the artist ends and the technology begins, at a time when many people were still trying to understand what an NFT actually was.
There were also women working together to build communities around crypto art.
In 2020, Women of Crypto Art, or WOCA, was formed by women working within the crypto-art space. Etta Tottie, Angie Taylor, Stina Jones, GiselXFlorez and Sparrow were among the women involved in founding the group.
The group created opportunities for women to discover one another, share their work and learn about this new world of crypto art. GiselXFlorez was also involved in creating a WOCA gallery in Cryptovoxels, and the group's She Art exhibition brought together the work of more than 30 women.
Other artists, including Maalavidaa, were openly discussing the difficulties women faced in gaining visibility within the emerging NFT market.
The issue was not simply about who was making art. It was also about who was being seen, promoted, collected and given opportunities.
Artists such as Michele Pred were using NFTs as an extension of their existing artistic practice. In 2021, Pred and other feminist artists organised a crypto-art drop around International Women's Day, bringing questions about gender and representation directly into the NFT conversation.
Looking back now, it is interesting to see how many different paths women were taking through the NFT movement.
Some came from traditional art. Others came from digital art. Some came from code, illustration, photography, animation or design. Some created collections. Others built communities. Some collected. Some used NFTs to explore identity and representation, and some simply found a new way to get their work in front of people.
The NFT movement was never one single thing.
It was a collection of artists, collectors, technologists and communities experimenting with what digital art could become.
Women were part of that experiment from the beginning. Their stories deserve to be part of the history too.
Not as a separate footnote to the NFT movement, but as part of the movement itself.
When we look back at this period, the important question is not simply which artists sold the most.
It is who was there, who was creating, who was experimenting, who was building communities and who helped shape what digital art became.
Perhaps the most interesting part is that the story is still being written. The technology will change, the platforms will change and the language around digital art will continue to evolve, but the artists who are willing to experiment and find new ways of creating will continue to shape what comes next.
There is still plenty of room for women to lead that conversation.
