| Biography | cris cheek (intentionally uncapitalised) is a multimodal poet and performance writer, working at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Born in London in 1955, he lived and worked in that capital until the early 1990s. An early influence was working alongside Bill Griffiths and Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society printshop in London and the Writers Forum group of poets who met with regularity on the premises in Earls Court, such as Allen Fisher. In 1981 he was a co-founder of Chisenhale Dance Space and for much of that decade he worked alongside musicians from the London Musicians Collective, choreographers and live artists to make interdisciplinary works.
His music and sound collaborations include Slant (a trio with Philip Jeck and Sianed Jones). His radio program "Music of Madagascar" produced for BBC Radio 3 won a Sony Gold Specialist Award (now Radio Academy Awards) in 1995. Between 1994-2005 he and Sianed Jones were based in the most easterly English town of Lowestoft. He taught on the Performance Writing course (1995-2002) at Dartington College of Arts where he became a Research Fellow in interdisciplinary text (2000-2002). A large body of interdisciplinary performance writing was produced in collaboration with Kirsten Lavers under the author function Things Not Worth Keeping between 1999-2007.
In 2005 he became a professor at Miami University in Ohio. He was Altman Fellow in The Humanities Center Miami University 20011-12, co-presenting the Networks and Power symposium and a conference on Network Archaeology from which an issue of the online journal Amodern, co-edited with Nicole Starosielski and Braxton Soderman, was published. He directed the creative writing program between 201214 and currently (August 2014) lives in Northside, Cincinnati with Dr. Erin Edwards. |