Few other contemporary artists have forged a unique and varied artistic vision as successfully, or forcibly as Lydia Lunch during her long, notorious career to date. After tearing through the New York late 70's music circles with hurricane force as part of the "No Wave" scene with her band Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Lunch relentlessly continued looking for fresh challenges. She consequently began to make her mark in literature, film, spoken-word performance, video, photography, poetry as well as a multitude of other creative endeavors. There was also a succession of groundbreaking, highly influential bands following Teenage Jesus, including Eight Eyed Spy, Beirut Slump, The Devil Dogs and 13.13 that would set the tone and establish the standards for NYC's aesthetic agenda for decades to come. As Lunch became more involved in a wider range of artistic pursuits, her musical endeavors of the 80's focused on an extended, infamous series of collaborations with the likes of members of Sonic Youth, Birthday Party, Foetus, Einsturzende Neubauten and many others. She also released recordings of her spoken word performances through various labels, founding her own Widowspeak label in 1984 as a steady outlet for this work. In the 90's, Lunch devoted still more of her time to writing, spoken-word performances and lecturing at academic institutions at home in the U.S. including teaching a class on Performance Art at the San Francisco Art Institute and even more so abroad with foreign engagements taking up the bulk of her time in recent years. In the present decade to date, Lydia has undertaken repeated tours of the U.S. and Europe giving spoken-word performances and bee featured at internationally prestigious events including the Portugal Literature Festival, 10th Annual International Poetry Festival of Genoa, Italy, Switzerland's Kulturzentrum, and the Barcelona Literature Festival Centre de Cultura Contemporanea to name but a few. Her still photography has been exhibited at galleries in Prague, Paris, Eindhoven, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Diego, Melbourne, Australia and elsewhere as well as this year's Fierce Festival in Birmingham, England. She has presented academic workshops on spoken-word composition and performance in Brugge, Belgium and Leipzig. Lunch has had a variety of short stories, essays and book Introductions published by outlets ranging from the Princeton University Press to Feral House to New Museum Anthology NYC to Rolling Stone Press. She co-edited and contributed numerous pieces to the Sex And Guts 4 anthology which featured work from Nick Tosches, Hubert Selby Jr., Jerry Stahl, and John Waters and co-edited Sin-E-Rama - Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties out October '04 on Feral House Books. On the musical front she toured Europe with multi-instrumentalist Terry Edwards in '01, spent four weeks on the road with Anubian Lights to support the 2002 release of the Champagne, Cocaine and Nicotine Stains EP, mounted a career spanning retrospective performance for the Graz Austria "Festival des Masochismus" accompanied by Nels Cline and former Swans members Vinnie Signorelli, Norman Westberg and Algis Kysiz in '93 and played a string of European dates including performances at Le Unique Festival Nantes, France and by special invitation to St Petersburg and Moscow, Russia in Spring 2004.