Chris Kraus (writer)

Chris Kraus (born 1955) is an American-born writer, critic, editor, filmmaker, performance artist, and educator. 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. She has also written a sequence of novels dealing with American underclass experience, beginning 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’. Kraus' work often blends intellectual, political, and sexual concerns with wit, oscillating between esoteric referencing and parody. Her work has drawn controversy for equalizing high and low culture, mixing critical theory with colloquial language, and graphic representations of sex.

Kraus has also produced 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 Kunst. 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 Joey Soloway and released on Amazon Video in 2018. Holland Cotter has described her as ‘one of our smartest and most original writers on contemporary art and culture’.