Faculty Profile

Bio

Education: BFA, 1988, Wright State University, Fairborn, Ohio; MFA, 1991, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Selected Performances: Captured By Your Eyes, Evanston Arts Center (2015), Solidarity, United Center, Chicago (2012), Lies Will Flow From My Lips..., Reed College, Portland Oregon (2004), The Fear of Freedom, San Francisco Friends Meeting House (1999), Oh Freedom!, ACTWU Meeting Hall, Chicago (1995), Young Blood, University of Nebraska, Omaha (1996), A Lovely Hybrid, Insight Arts, Chicago (1996), Our Stories, Howard Theater, Chicago (1996) Some Movements Against The Death Penalty, United Church of Rogers Park, Chicago (1995),Thoughts That Do Often Lie Too Deep For Tears, Insight Arts, Overdier Hall, Chicago (1994). Publications; Public Eye, P-Form, Bibliography: Third Coast, Chicago Reader, New City, High Performance, P-Form, Streetwise, Afterimage. Selected Curation: Moving Image Insights, Evanston Arts Center (2016-2017), Decay: The City and Social Structures: New Work by Robert Sebanc, Rumble Arts Center (2013): The Body, The Individual and The State, Riverside Arts Center (2007), Creative Movements Festival (2003). Selected Awards and Fellowships: Wagner School of Leadership, NYU Fellowship, Next Generation of Leadership, Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship.

Personal Statement

"From error to error, one discovers the entire truth".
-Sigmund Freud

“When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings -- let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf

Craig is a performance artist, theater director, cultural critic and curator. He has extensive experience in the management and governance of arts and social justice organizations. Craig’s work is rooted in a commitment to critical pedagogy, anti-imperialism and the inter-activity of movements for radical democracy and environmental sanity. In 1991 Craig founded Insight Arts, a contemporary arts organization focused on supporting progressive cultural work, where he served as Executive Director until 2015. Craig was also the co-founder of The Youth Justice Funding Collaborative, a project to expand funding to organizations working for juvenile justice reform and to end mass incarceration. Craig’s research/creative interests include work in reception theory, critical pedagogy, theatre history, art history, critical race theory, Queer theory, psychoanalytic studies, film history and theory, critical literary theory, Marxism, and critical visual studies.

Craig has taught a wide range of courses in art history, film studies, social theory, philosophy, democracy studies, art therapy, art education, performance art, acting, theater directing, community organizing and arts administration in a variety of university and community based settings. Craig was a contributing editor for the Performance Art journal P-Form and has been published in a wide range of cultural and social justice publications including The Public Eye, In These Times, and Underground Philosophy. Craig co-hosts with Leah Gipson, a monthly live radio broadcast DIVISIVE exploring the connection between cultural work and politics. Craig is currently working on three major performance works: THE ONE WHO STANDS ALONE a collaboration with the philosopher Si-Hua Chang and performance artist Kym Olsen exploring the transformational power of divisiveness, risk and failure, THE THINKING OF THE INFATUATED ONE, a exploration of six decades of queer male history between 1911-1971 reacting to the gestation and evolving critical reception of Thomas Mann's novella Death In Venice, and THE STRANGE LIFE AND MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF PROFESSOR C. a self-reflective exploration of struggling to teach within the confines of an elite, neoliberal, art school in America.