Biography

Chris Kraus (born 1955) is a writer and critic. Her work includes the novels I Love Dick, Aliens and Anorexia, and Torpor, which form a loose trilogy that navigates between autobiography, fiction, philosophy, and art criticism, and a sequence of novels dealing with American underclass experience that began with Summer of Hate. Her approach to writing has been described as ‘performance art within the medium of writing’ and ‘a bright map of presence’. Her work has drawn controversy through its equalisation of high and low culture, mixing critical theory with colloquial language and graphic representations of sex. Her books often blend intellectual, political, and sexual concerns with wit, oscillating between esoteric referencing and parody. She has written extensively in the fields of art and cultural criticism.

Kraus has also produced numerous plays and films, including the feature film Gravity & Grace. Her work has featured in publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, Afterall, The New Yorker, The New York Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, and Texte zur Kunste. She taught creative writing and art writing at The European Graduate School/EGS for ten years and has been Writer in Residence at ArtCenter College of Design. Kraus is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for General Non-Fiction (2016), a Warhol Foundation Arts Writing Grant (2011), and Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism from the College Art Association (2008).

Kraus is co-editor of the publishing house Semiotext(e). Her bestselling novel, I Love Dick, was adapted for television by Jill Soloway and released on Amazon Video (2018). Holland Cotter has described her as ‘one of our smartest and most original writers on contemporary art and culture’. Christine Kraus was born in The Bronx, New York City, and spent her childhood in Milford, Connecticut, and New Zealand. Kraus completed a BA in literature and political theory at Victoria University of Wellington, beginning at the university at the age of 16. She worked as a journalist for five years after the completion of her BA. When she was 21 she arrived in New York, where she began studying with actor Ruth Maleczech and director Lee Breuer, whose studio in the East Village was called ReCherChez.Kraus is Jewish and deals with many spiritual and social aspects of Judaism in her works. She says that her parents attended Christian church and did not tell her that her family is Jewish until she moved back to Manhattan at age 21, possibly to shield her from antisemitism.She continued to make films through the mid-1990s. As of 2006 she was married to Sylvère Lotringer, a Jewish man who survived the Holocaust as a child. They had divorced by 2016. Some of her works are based on her marriage and her ex-husband.Kraus' I Love Dick was first published in North America in 1997, initially receiving a poor reception but going on to become a popular success. At first, according to Anakana Schofield of The Irish Times, the novel was only a "cult hit" among the visual arts community and did not receive much attention from "mainstream literary culture". I Love Dick was not published in the United Kingdom until 2015.In 2017, Kraus published After Kathy Acker, a biography of Kathy Acker.Kraus is a landlord, owning several low-income properties in Albuquerque, New Mexico - she describes this as "a day job". Kraus "chose early on not to pursue full-time teaching", instead focusing on property management which she claims takes "a couple of hours every day".