There is no overseer of the perfect artist statement and bio that is going to come get you for not adhering to rules that never existed. Breathe a sigh of relief.
You can’t go wrong unless you have a bunch of type-os, use poor grammar, or don’t align your tenses.
Here are some guidelines for which tenses to use and when when you’re writing your artist statement and bio.
Your Artist Bio
Your bio is about you and your artistic accomplishments. It is not your life story.
It is written in the third person (otherwise, it would be an autobiography). It helps to think of it as your résumé in paragraph form.
Write it in reverse chronological order, acknowledging that your most important accomplishments are those that are most recent. You can open a bio with a short paragraph summarizing your current work. This can be taken from your statement and reworked for the bio format.
Your Artist Statement
In contrast to your bio, which is about your accomplishments, your statement is about your work—the current direction of your work, not the history of how you got to this point. It’s your opportunity to define a body of work before others respond to the work and define it for you.
Your statement—because it is a statement—is written in first person. It is not the definitive statement about your work forever and ever because your work changes. You must allow your statement to get better and to grow along with your art.
My litmus test for a good statement is
