Biography
Born in Austin, Texas, raised in Boone, North Carolina, and educated at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and at Cornell University, John Crutchfield is a writer and performer who currently divides his time between Asheville, North Carolina and Berlin, Germany. He is the recipient of a Morehead Foundation Scholarship, a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, and numerous grants and fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council. His poems, essays, translations and reviews have appeared in a variety of literary and cultural journals, including Shenandoah, Seneca Review, Southern Review, Southern Poetry Review, Appalachian Journal, and Zone 3. His full-length plays The Songs of Robert, Ruth, Twelve Treatises on Memory, Everything and God, Ivory, The Labyrinth, Solstice, Landscape With Missing Person, Come Thick Night, The Strange and Tragical Adventures of Pinocchio, The Jacob Higginbotham Show, TRNZ, My Crazy My Love, and Robert Returns have been produced regionally, as have various shorter works and adaptations, including Portrait and Interstice/Larkspur, a pair of one-acts dealing with the theme of addiction, and Caliban’s Dream and Black Snow Flying Upwards, or: My Embarrassment, two movement-based solo performances which premiered at the Asheville Fringe Arts Festival in 2007 and 2008 respectively. His one-man version of The Songs of Robert was featured in the 2009 New York International Fringe Festival, where it won a Judges' Award for Outstanding Solo Performance.
With Steve Samuels, Chall Gray and Lucia del Vecchio, John co-founded The Magnetic Theatre in 2008. Ten years later, in 2018, he and Steve Samuels founded The Sublime Theater & Press, of which John is Associate Artistic Director.
An avid collaborator, John has created and performed multidisciplinary work with X Factor Dance, Sans Pointe Dance, G. Alex and the Movement, Legacy Butoh, Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre, and Anemone Dance Theatre. He has also appeared onstage as “Malvolio” in Twelfth Night (Appalachian State University), “Caliban” in The Tempest (Lenoir-Rhyne Players), "Banquo" and "Doctor" in Macbeth (NCStage), "Prosecutor" in David Mamet's Romance (Zealot), "Fraser" in Mac Wellman's Description Beggared, or: The Allegory of Whiteness (Warren Wilson College), "Peck" in Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive (Warren Wilson College), "Jekyll/Hyde" in Steve Samuels's When Jekyll Met Hyde (The Magnetic Theatre), and "Babe" and “John” in Julian Vorus's Rock Saber and Red, Black, White, respectively (The Magnetic Theatre). He also directs and designs.
John has been Artist-In-Residence at the North Carolina Governor’s School East, the Djerassi Artists Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Association d’Art de La Napoule (France) and the Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe (Germany), as well as for shorter stints at various American schools, colleges, and universities. He has also taught on the faculties of various colleges and universities, including Appalachain State University, Warren Wilson College, Lenoir-Rhyne University, and The University of North Carolina at Asheville. At present, he teaches Humanities at the Barenboim-Said Akademie für Musik in Berlin, where he is also Founding Artistic Director of MAUS Theater of Berlin, a flexible collaborative devoted to creating new interdisciplinary performance.
In addition to his work in theatre and literature, John is also a practicing musician, with experience on percussion, acoustic guitar, slide guitar, and clawhammer-style banjo. He has been an active participant in the vibrant Old Time music scene in Asheville, where he frequently performs in open jam sessions, as well as with the Old Time string bands Chicken Train (with John Engle), The New Southern Ramblers (with John Herrmann), and The Crutchfield Project (with Alan Dillman). Since first moving to Berlin in 2013, he has performed regularly with The Bear City Ramblers, a trio he co-founded with fiddler Doug Chayka and guitarist Ben Smith.
John also works freelance as a literary and academic translator, having translated works by Durs Grünbein, Helmut Lachenmann and Rebekka Voss, among others.
Contact
John Crutchfield
Breisgauer Strasse 16a
14129 BERLIN
Germany
johnrandolphcrutchfield [@] gmail.com
photo by Shaleigh Comerford