Kraus, Chris, 1955-

Chris Kraus (born 1955) is an American writer, art critic, editor, filmmaker, writing instructor, playwright, and theatre director. She is best known for her autobiographical novel, I Love Dick. From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, she worked in New York City as a playwright and theatre director. She wrote and directed the plays Disparate Action/Desperate Action and Readings from the Diaries of Hugo Ball, and co-wrote I Talked about God with Antonin Artaud with Sylvère Lotringer. They later collaborated on the film How to Shoot a Crime. Kraus was married to Lotringer from the late 1980s through the late 1990s. While working in theatre in the early 1980s, Kraus began to write and produce short films. These include The Golden Bowl or Repression and Gravity and Grace. In 1990, she started as co-editor with Lotringer at Semiotext(e), a journal and small publishing house he founded 1974, and she started the Native Agents Series there at the time. At the time of this writing (2019), Kraus was still co-editor at Semiotext(e). In the late 1990s, she moved to Los Angeles, California and began focusing on art criticism, fiction writing, and teaching. Some of her notable works include the autobiographical novels I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, and Summer of Hate; the non-fiction collections Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness and Where Art Belongs; and the biography After Kathy Acker.