Juano Diaz

Juano Díaz – Artist, Filmmaker & Best-Selling Author

Juano Díaz (b. 1977, Glasgow) is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and best-selling author whose work fuses personal mythology, queer identity, and Romani cultural heritage. Raised in the Glasgow care system and later adopted into a Romany-Gypsy family, Díaz transforms lived experience into visually rich, emotionally resonant art.

Now based in Wiltshire with his partner, David, and their son, Díaz works across painting, photography, film, and digital collage. His hand-finished photo works—digitally reimagined and layered with vibrant acrylics—honour Romani traditions of hand-colouring and craft. Many pieces are rooted in the stories passed down from his Gypsy grandmother, which Díaz reimagines through the kaleidoscopic filters of pop culture, queer culture, and cinematic excess—merging the sacred with the profane, the folkloric with the hypermodern.

Raised among the twisted metal and strange treasures of his father's Gypsy scrapyard, Díaz often incorporates discarded materials and visual debris into his work. Photographs float in seas of plastic waste, anchoring beauty within the overlooked and unwanted. Faces from his childhood—sometimes visible only when the artwork is turned upside down—hide in stains, shadows, or brushstrokes. These ghostly figures are often secret, seen only by the artist himself, creating an intimate, coded visual language of memory, loss, and magic.

Slum textures—rust, ash, concrete, and soot—sit beside Romany tarot symbolism, Catholic iconography, drag pageantry, and 1980s glamour. Díaz’s visual language is devotional and defiant: a fusion of shrine and scrapheap, grief and glitter.

He modelled for Thierry Mugler and the iconic Pierre et Gilles and served as artist assistant to the late James Bidgood—both formative influences on his theatrical, sensual, and symbol-laden aesthetic.

In 2024, Díaz published his best-selling memoir Slum Boy, a lyrical, unflinching account of trauma, identity, and resilience. It was met with widespread critical acclaim:

“This is the best book we have ever read.”
— Gilbert & George

“Beautifully written… This elegant memoir immediately brings to mind Douglas Stuart’s Booker-winningShuggie Bain.”
— The Guardian

“A heart-breaking, inspiring read.”
— Alan Cumming

“Compulsively readable… Dickensian in its rich cast of Glaswegian characters.”
— Patrick Gale

“I laughed and cried. It’s a masterpiece.”
— Joey Arias

“What a brave and powerful story. If you like Shuggie Bain and Damian Barr then Slum Boy is for you.”
— Lemn Sissay

“One of the most moving accounts of non-fiction ever written.”
— The Guardian (via Hachette Australia)

Key Achievements & Recognition

· Directed Deux Ombres, screened at MoMA and acquired by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art

· Artist assistant to queer visionary James Bidgood; model for Thierry Mugler and Pierre et Gilles; collaborator with Grace Jones and David LaChapelle

· Exhibited internationally; work held in global private and corporate collections

· Best-selling author of Slum Boy (2024), praised for its poetic honesty and cultural depth

· Featured in The Times, Attitude, The Guardian, and Yahoo Life UK

Artistic Vision
Juano Díaz creates sacred spaces from broken places. His work conjures the forgotten, the fabulous, and the forbidden—where Romani folklore, Catholic mysticism, queer glamour, and the ruins of poverty collide. He channels the colour, chaos, and magic of his lived experience into images that are at once ritual and rebellion, shrine and séance, mirror and mask.