Cassandra Troyan

Cassandra Troyan is a writer, organizer, and ex-artist who grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where they earned a BA in History of Art and Film Studies at the Ohio State University and an MFA in Visual Art from the University of Chicago. Troyan is the author of Throne of Blood (2013), Blacken Me Blacken Me, Growled (2014), and Kill Manual (2014). Since 2010, they have curated the reading and performance series Artificial Ear (formerly known as Ear Eater) with numerous friends and collaborators in Chicago, where they currently live.

Troyan’s work explores the terror of becoming female amidst the accelerated haze of contemporary culture, deriving pleasure and power from interrogations of submission, violence, queer desire, sex work, horror, and capital. By engaging a practice of radical alterity, Christopher Higgs writes in a review at The Collagist, “The question Throne of Blood seems interested in provoking is not the basic ontological question, 'what does it mean to be,' but rather a more rabidly black and potently nihilistic question: who gives a fuck about being? Or, put in the form of a statement rather than a question: to be is not to be, forget the question.” At Vice, Blake Butler evinces another notion of being in Kill Manual, as “Troyan infects the struggle of the self into a living, breathing language-system, spitting and shrieking and cackling rather than just whining and worshipping, using reality's death threat against itself.”