Mike Kelley was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1954, and lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a BFA from the University of Michigan, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Kelley’s work ranges from highly symbolic and ritualistic performance pieces, to arrangements of stuffed-animal sculptures, to wall-sized drawings, to multi-room installations that restage institutional environments (schools, offices, zoos), to extended collaborations with artists such as Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, and the band Sonic Youth. A critic and curator, Kelley writes for art and music journals and has organised numerous exhibitions incor-porating his own work, work by fellow artists, and non-art objects that exemplify aspects of nostalgia, the grotesque, and the uncanny. Major solo exhibitions include ‘Catholic Tastes’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1993); ‘Mike Kelley’, Museu d’art Contemporani, Barcelona (1997); ‘Framed and Framed, Test Room, Sublevel’, MAGASIN, Grenoble (1999); ‘The Uncanny’, Tate Liverpool and Museum Moderne Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna (2004); ‘Profondeurs Vertes’, Musée du Louvre (2006); and ‘Educational Complex Onwards: 1995–2008’, WIELS Centre. [last updated in 2011]