A bio is a short tidbit of text that is supposed to tell people just enough information that they get a sense of you by reading through it. However, a bio isn’t supposed to be a creative act of self expression even though it’s about who you are. A bio is not meant to be read. It’s a placeholder for you, an extension of your name that hopefully has some links in it so that people can access other parts of you.
The difference between bios and creative self expression is that creative self expression is about navigating selfhood, existence, and the meaning of those things while bios are expected to contextualize all of that. Bios are meant to convey a meta perspective of your work as separate from your life. We expect bios to be a list of recognizable professional accomplishments that serve to make a person more legitimate in whatever context it’s being viewed under.
Maybe that’s the word for it—if bios are not read then they are viewed.
You know what I think bios really are? They’re a wedge—a shield. We use bios not to explain ourselves or our practices or what we are trying to do. We use bios to protect ourselves, to filter ourselves, and to defend. Bios are fighting words.
My own bio is a bit ridiculous. Here it is:
Alice Sparkly Kat is an astrologer. Their goal is to bring reconstruction and historicism back into astrology and to bring mysticism back into storytelling. Their astrological work has inhabited MoMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Brooklyn Museum. They're the author of Postcolonial Astrology (May 2021). Their website is alicesparklykat.com.
It has a link which is very important because this means that places that I write for that list my bio will link back to my website and this will make Google think that I am more trustworthy. It has a book because I want people to read this book that I wrote. Then, it features some art institutions even though those are institutions that I really just brushed up against, displaying a game here and doing an artist talk there, and the majority of my attention and work go into the relationships that I am creating with people outside of any institutional space whatsoever.
Sometimes, I keep my bio short. Alice Sparkly Kat is an astrologer. That’s my whole bio. I think that contextualizes things enough because astrology is its own context. (I am wrong about this because the astrology world is very big and there are a lot of assumptions that people tend to make about astrologers that don’t tend to be true.)
These are fighting words, the words in this bio. I am trying to carve out a space for myself and to protect that space also.
A bio could be really anything. It could be a list of historical events that happened during your lifetime, a list of historical events that your extended family survived, a list of professional accomplishments that you will never achieve, a list of various jobs that you have ever worked, or a list of abandoned projects. All of those things will contextualize your work just as much as a list of legitimizing accomplishments, if not more so.
Alice Sparkly Kat has so far lived through the Asian Financial Crash of 1997, September 11, 2001 and the subsequent imperial wars that followed, the recession of 2008, the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, the election of a television personality in 2016, and the global pandemic of 2020 and beyond.
Alice Sparkly Kat is from a familial context that somehow survived the KMT purges of Communists in the 1920s, the flood of the yellow river of 1938, the Henan Famine of 1942, the Great Chinese Famine of 1959, the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Cultural Revolution, and the eugenics policy of the one child policy.
Alice Sparkly Kat will never in their career seek or achieve any professional accomplishments related to science, politics, music, dance, cooking, design, poetry, or sports. They are an astrologer.
Alice Sparkly Kat has worked the following jobs: salesperson, cashier, fabricator, data entry, teacher, events coordinator, handyman, nanny, freelance website designer, and astrologer. They did seek and receive higher education but it is their own opinion that they did not leverage this degree very well.
When Alice Sparkly Kat was in their early twenties, they tried to make a documentary about the color blue. Now they are an astrologer.
I think all of these bios contextualize my work very well and they are probably funner to read than a list of professional accomplishments. They’re definitely funner to write and I think they give you more information than the one that I currently use as a mask.
And, yet, none of these bios are me. Alice Sparkly Kat isn’t even my real name. It’s not what my friends call me and it isn’t even what my clients call me. It’s not even the name of a persona but simply the name of my website. I heard somewhere that one of the biggest differences between introverts and extroverts is that introverts don’t derive energy from the creation and performance of their persona. I think that this may be true because I am extremely introverted and I haven’t updated the bio that I use in years. I haven’t updated it because I think it’s fine and functions well as a shield and I don’t like thinking about it that much.
Just some thoughts—sometimes I write here to express something more personal and this is one of those instances. If you are here because you were looking for motivation or advice about how to write a bio for something, then I can only sincerely apologize. I hope you at least had one laugh at me.
