Kraus, Chris, 1955-

Chris Kraus (born 1955[1]) is an American writer and filmmaker. Her novels include I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Summer of Hate. Video Green, Kraus' first non-fiction book, examines the explosion of late 1990s art by high-profile graduate programs that catapulted Los Angeles into the center of the international art world.[according to whom?] Her films include Gravity & Grace, How To Shoot A Crime, and The Golden Bowl, or, Repression.

Kraus was born in New York City[2] and spent her childhood in Connecticut and New Zealand. After obtaining a BA at a young age from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, Kraus worked as a journalist for five years, and then moved to New York City. Kraus was aged 21 when she arrived in New York and began studying with actor Ruth Maleczech and director Lee Breuer, whose studio in the East Village was called ReCherChez.[3] Kraus made films and video art and staged performances and plays at many venues. In the late 1970s she was a member of The Artists Project, a City-funded public service venture of painters, poets, writers, filmmakers and dancers.

Her work as a performance and video artist satirized the Downtown scene's gender politics and favored literary tropes, blending theatrical techniques with Dada, literary criticism, social activism, and performance art.

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.[4][5]

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,[5] but they had divorced by 2016.[4] Some of her works are based on her marriage and her ex-husband.[4][5] She now lives in Los Angeles.

In 2017, Kraus published After Kathy Acker, a biography of Kathy Acker.[6]