Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. Born in 1970 and raised in Valley Stream on Long Island near New York City, Cutrone is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Departments of Art History, Theory and Criticism and Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (since 2004) and instructor at the Institute for Clinical Social Work (since 2018). He was a longtime lecturer in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago (2002-2018), where he completed the PhD in the Committee on the History of Culture (2013) and MA in Art History (2005). He received the MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1996) and the BA from Hampshire College (1993). His doctoral dissertation is on Adorno’s Marxism (2013).

Cutrone is the original lead organizer of the Platypus Affiliated Society (its reading group in Chicago was established in 2006). From 1989–92, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the Los Angeles Riots and the election of Bill Clinton, Cutrone was a youth member of the Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), upholding the revolutionary socialist tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and the October Revolution of 1917.