Dave Beech was born in Warrington in 1965 and studied Fine Art at Leicester Polytechnic and Cultural Theory at the Royal College of Art. He is a member of the art collective Freee with Mel Jordan and Andy Hewitt, who make sloganeering billboard works, video performances and spoken choirs in the public sphere. He has written extensively on the politics of contemporary art for over 20 years, both in magazines like Art Monthly, Mute and Variant, and in books such as The Philistine Controversy, Searching for Art’s New Publics and Beauty. He is curating a major exhibition at the Pratt Institute in New York with Paul O’Neill on text art that will open in March 2011.