Last semester, I wrote an artist bio for my Media Writing class. I don’t have any trouble with writing in general, but I struggle a lot with how to narrow down ideas.
There’s a reason my desktop wallpaper is a constant reminder to simplify and stop over-thinking. Very often, I have too many thoughts popping up at the same time, too much material to work with, and too many tangents going off of my starting points.
I used to react with confusion to statements about how I should write an autobiography. Why? What was I doing that was so important? I wasn’t rich or famous. Didn’t everyone go to Occupy Wall Street? Sure, it was funny to end up in the British tabloids in 2009—but wasn’t that also kind of embarrassing?
Within the last year or so I’ve started to see why people make those statements, though. When I try to summarize my life, I struggle with where to even begin… and then I see why people always have colorful ways of describing me, like “one of the people who made New York what it was,” or “my acid trip of a friend.”
My challenge with writing a 300 word artist statement isn’t what to say– it’s how to keep it focused and brief.
So I wrote this when I was asked for an artist bio:
For about a decade, I lived in New York City. I met most of my friends working as a production assistant, costume designer, and background actor on nearly every film and TV production in the city!
Outside of work, I was known for being “one of the people who made the city what it was” by connecting with creative, eccentric people and introducing them to each other.
I left the city in July 2020 because New York closed my industry for months, and there was no clear timeline for when things would return to normal. Spoiler alert: my friends who stayed there say it never returned to 2019 normal.
I moved to Sioux Falls in February 2022 after almost a year of searching for a place to start a new life. While packing, I had an idea for an art exhibit called “Out of Lockstep.”
I have always been adaptable and able to roll with life changes while finding the humor in absolutely everything. I feel just as comfortable DJing a wedding three hours outside of Sioux Falls as I did weaving through the underground art, music, and nightlife scene of the most densely populated city in the US.
The personal, communicative, and psychological aspect of design and marketing interests me deeply. I love gaining a deeper understanding of how people think and how to design in a way that resonates with them. I once persuaded some family members to book last-minute flights to Armenia for my brother’s wedding by designing an attractive webpage and invitations.
One guest at the lean startup phase of “Out of Lockstep” described it as “a rite of passage.” A fellow Startup founder at a seminar said it will “transgress but also build bridges.”
I had to cut everything before the 2010s for the sake of having a low word count. The brevity meant leaving out my childhood, family, adolescence, the Studio Art degree from SUNY Brockport, the fact that I’d lived on three different continents before 2010, the fact that I was a core member of Occupy Wall Street… it mostly focused on what happened after 2020. I also did the opposite of “turning it up to 11” with the way I phrased things. This was the “turned down to 1” version of my story.
I then had to cut this back further because the layout for a booklet didn’t actually allow for both the allotted word count of that assignment and for paragraph breaks.
Seeing how my bio looked as a solid wall of text made me pause. It didn’t look inviting to read at all.
It’s 2025, and everyone has a short attention span. Expecting people to read my bio with shorter paragraphs when they don’t know me is already enough of an ask without throwing an unstructured wall of text at them.
I decided to sacrifice content in favor of having paragraph breaks.
So I cut the second-to-last paragraph. Like the memo on my screen says… “Don’t overthink it. Less is more.” That accidentally amped up the level of intensity, but being a little more intense is preferable to having an overwhelming block of writing with no space.
Paragraph breaks are part of the story, the same way rest notes are music notes and negative space is part of visual composition. Sometimes what isn’t there is even more important than what is there.