Born in 1970 and raised in Valley Stream on Long Island near New York City, Chris Cutrone teaches in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is a PhD candidate in the Committee on the History of Culture and lecturer in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, where he completed the MA in Art History. He received the MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the BA from Hampshire College. His doctoral dissertation is on Adorno's Marxism.