Chris Kraus

Chris Kraus is an American writer, critic, and filmmaker whose work moves between fiction, philosophy, and art criticism. She is best known for the novel I Love Dick (1997), considered a landmark in autofiction and later adapted for television by Joey Soloway in 2018. Her other books include Aliens and Anorexia (2000), Torpor (2006), and Summer of Hate (2012).

Kraus is also recognised for her role as co-editor of Semiotext(e), where she launched the Native Agents imprint. She has received several awards, including the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism in 2008 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016.

Chris Kraus was born in 1955 in The Bronx, New York, and moved to Connecticut as a child. At the age of fourteen, she emigrated with her family to New Zealand. She studied at Victoria University of Wellington, where she received a journalism scholarship at the age of sixteen. Kraus worked as a journalist for several years before leaving for London and later New York.

In New York, she studied theatre with Richard Schechner and later joined the performance group ReCherChez. Her early creative life included acting, playwriting, and working for the artist Louise Bourgeois, who influenced her approach to directness in art. In 1983, she shifted to filmmaking, producing works such as Gravity & Grace and How to Shoot a Crime.

Her first novel, I Love Dick, began as a series of unsent letters but evolved into a work that combines autobiography, theory, and fiction. The book gained a cult following and was later described by The Guardian as a “cult feminist classic.” Kraus explained her approach, saying, “In I Love Dick, I consciously set out to see if I could say ‘cunt’ and ‘Kierkegaard’ in the same sentence. And I did it, it drives people crazy.”

Kraus continued to expand her experimental style in Aliens and Anorexia and Torpor, works that combine philosophy, criticism, and autobiography. Summer of Hate addressed class, incarceration, and social inequality in America.

In 2017, Chris Kraus published After Kathy Acker, the first authorised biography of the writer, which critics praised for its frank and unconventional style.

Alongside her books, Kraus taught creative and art writing at the European Graduate School and served as Writer-in-Residence at ArtCenter College of Design. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Artforum, The Paris Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Photo credit: IG @chriskraus7