27 Facts About Karen Finley

Karen Finley was born on 1956 and is an American performance artist, musician, poet, and educator.

Karen Finley is a professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

Karen Finley has written various books that focus on controversial topics.

Karen Finley wrote Shock Treatment, Enough Is Enough: Weekly Meditations for Living Dysfunctionally, the Martha Stewart satire Living It Up: Humorous Adventures in Hyperdomesticity, Pooh Unplugged, and A Different Kind of Intimacy - a later collection of her works.

Karen Finley's poetry is included in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.

Karen Finley was born in Chicago and raised in Evanston, Illinois.

Karen Finley is a relative of the American humorist and writer Finley Peter Dunne.

Karen Finley describes her father George Finley as being of Irish and Scottish descent and her mother Mary as "part gypsy" and " part American Indian and Jewish".

Karen Finley has said that her mother was "taken as brown" during her life and experienced racism.

In 1977, Karen Finley performed in underground art galleries and music clubs such as Mabuhay Gardens and Club Foot, which hosted poetry readings, punk concerts, and alternative performance art acts.

Karen Finley quickly became part of the city's art scene, collaborating with artists such as The Kipper Kids and David Wojnarowicz.

Karen Finley collaborated with Sinead O'Connor on a remix of O'Connor's song "Jump in the River", and was prominently sampled by S'Express on the classic dance floor cut-up, "Theme from S-Express".

Karen Finley was notably one of the NEA Four, four performance artists whose grants from the National Endowment for the Arts were vetoed in 1990 by John Frohnmayer after the process was condemned by Senator Jesse Helms under "decency" issues.

Karen Finley played Tom Hanks' character's doctor in the movie Philadelphia at the invitation of director Jonathan Demme.

In 1993, Karen Finley was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts.

Karen Finley released a double-disc set on the Rykodisc label, A Certain Level of Denial, a studio version of the performance piece.

Karen Finley has expressed delight at the fact that she appeared in Playboy and received a Ms.

Karen Finley was featured in Time during this period, though she felt that the magazine misrepresented her by "eroticizing" works based on her nudity alone; in other words, that they could not absorb any information beyond her naked body.

In 2009, Karen Finley created a memorial at the concentration camp in Gusen, Austria to commemorate the murder by lethal injection to the heart of 420 Jewish children by the Nazis in February 1945.

Karen Finley published a compendium of her work from 2001 to 2010 through The Feminist Press at CUNY.

In 2012, Karen Finley was a Fellow at Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania where she introduced a new work, Broken Negative Catch 23, a deeply personal reflection of her performance We Keep Our Victims Ready that had ignited the NEA controversy 23 years before.

Karen Finley developed a new performance based on her early writing about AIDS from the 1980s and 1990s.

In 2013, Karen Finley responded to a request to participate in a New York gallery exhibition looking back at the past 25 years of the AIDS epidemic, NOT OVER: 25 Years of Visual AIDS, to which Karen Finley responded by installing an abbreviated homage to her early installation, Written in Sand, originally presented at Hallwalls in Buffalo.

In 2016, Karen Finley introduced "Unicorn, Gratitude, Mystery" at New York City's Laurie Beechman Theater on 42nd Street.

In 2017, Karen Finley appeared as the lead actor in director Bruce Yonemoto's film, Far East of Eden, which explores institutional and state racism in 1910s California through the lens of racist Senator James Duval Phelan.

Karen Finley's work was influenced by her professors at the San Francisco Art Institute, Linda Montano and Howard Fried and pioneer performance artist Carolee Schneemann.

Karen Finley was influenced by jazz artists such as Billie Holiday and the beat poets of San Francisco, such as Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg.