Manhattan's Tracey Emin

Rachel Feinstein sighs. She's weary and hung over. She went out last night at midnight and got drunk with a friend. "I just had a bad day yesterday," she explains. Her studio is in chaos and half-made work is strewn across the space. She's getting ready for her first major solo show and later that day has to entertain collectors from an important American museum. NY party girl as artist or NY artist as party girl - depending on how you look at it - 30-year-old Feinstein is Manhattan's answer to Tracey Emin. And now she's poised to be the art world's next big star.

Like Emin, Feinstein is attracted to the sexually explicit. Her Valley Girl meets Manhattan intonation is peppered with expletives, and a few years back she famously turned up at an interview for a place on Yale University's prestigious art programme wearing a micro-mini and her favourite T-shirt. "It was skin-tight and said 'I'm a satisfier', with a big rainbow on it. I thought they should just see the real me, but they were very offended."

Needless to say, she didn't get on the course, but that didn't stop her from making the cartoony sculpture installations that are so popular right now. Just the other day she was photographed for fashion magazine Pop wearing a 1940s pin-up-style, flesh-toned bathing costume. But she's the kind of person who refuses to apologise for it. "I get told, 'people aren't going to take you seriously if you do things like that', but that's their f***king problem. I still hate it," she says, exasperated. "If I say no to fluffy articles, I feel like I'm not acting like myself."

Feinstein grew up not in Margate but in down-at-heel, Eighties Miami. Her work takes her memories of a Florida childhood and combines them with the garish colours and feel of her home town to come up with a twisted Disney World. It's a land of crumbling gated communities and McMansions built on swamps, all translated by Feinstein into MDF stage-sets that capture the disjunction between American suburbia's fairy-tale dreams and the seedy realities which lie beneath them.

And like Emin, she draws inspiration from her own sexual experiences. One gallery installation featured a gingerbread house with the artist playing Sleeping Beauty. According to Feinstein, the fairy story is "about rape, and making sure you're ready for your sexuality".

She has already appeared in the pages of American Vogue and Vanity Fair and has been grouped with a bunch of women artists called "the beautiful young things" in the pages of Harper's Bazaar. But she insists her success has nothing to do with her looks. "You still have to be a good artist. There are a number of attractive people I see at openings, and they're just really shitty artists and that won't get you far at all." Feinstein rose to fame a couple of years ago when her close friend and studio mate Jessica Craig Martin (whose father Michael Craig Martin taught Damien Hirst et al at Goldsmiths) started shooting parties for Vogue. She took pictures of all her friends and the magazine printed them. "It was a case of total insider trading. Jessica was just a really good friend of mine who happened to work there," Feinstein says.

Now she insists, "I'd rather people see my work and have no idea who I am or what I look like or where I live and make their own assumptions. My work has nothing to do with how I live my life." And the feature in Pop this autumn? Well, that was all just the result of "more insider trading" and another "good friend", this time uberstylist Katie Grand. They met when Feinstein's husband, John Currin - himself a big name in the New York art world - did a Pulp cover, but Feinstein didn't know anything about the bathing-beauty theme until she arrived at the shoot. "I was totally freaked out. Let me tell you, I'm not thinking about looking good in a bathing suit these days. If it had been anyone else, I would have walked in a second," she says.

? Rachel Feinstein is at the Barbican as part of The Americans: New Art show, at the Marianne Boesky Gallery from 10 November and at Sotheby's from 15 November.