Sharon Cheslow

Sharon Ann Cheslow (born October 5, 1961) is an American musician, composer, artist, writer, photographer, educator, and archivist.

Her family moved to the Washington, D.C. suburbs in 1967 after Cheslow's father, a Caltech graduate, got a job with the U.S. Department of Transportation.

They first moved to Silver Spring, MD and then to Bethesda, MD where she experienced antisemitism.

Cheslow listened to rock and roll and was influenced by her parents' love of music, especially folk protest music – one of Cheslow's earliest memories is of listening to her parents' Bob Dylan records.

As a young child, Cheslow started singing and playing guitar, as well as taking photographs.

Cheslow was influenced by the Beatles, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith, The Slits, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and jazz.

Her first band Chalk Circle, as guitarist, grew out of her friendships with Anne Bonafede, Henry Garfield (later Henry Rollins), and members of the Teen Idles and Untouchables around late 1979/early 1980.

They shared a love of Bad Brains and California punk.

When the D.C. hardcore scene became more macho and male-dominated, Chalk Circle didn't fit in and were put down for being all girls.

But they got support from art punk bands such as Half Japanese and Velvet Monkeys.

Cheslow attended University of Maryland and first learned about feminist theory through film studies classes with Robert Kolker.

These experiences led Cheslow to examine and write about the role of women in music.

Cheslow stated, "My main goal was to write about music from a female perspective, and that included writing about the fact that female musicians weren't taken seriously."

In 1981, she formed Chalk Circle, Washington, D.C.'s first all-female punk band.

She has since become an accomplished artist who works between different mediums, mostly sound-based.

Cheslow was born in Los Angeles, California.

She has a B.A. in Intermedia Arts from Mills College, attended graduate school in Music at California Institute of the Arts, and completed a Master of Library and Information Science degree from San José State University.

She has worked or taught at Mills College's Olin Library, Stanford University, Bay Area Video Coalition, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Santa Cruz, and California Institute of the Arts.

As a pioneer on many levels, she has collaborated with numerous musicians and artists.

Her work crosses boundaries and addresses subject/object relationships.

Born in Los Angeles, Sharon Cheslow grew up in the Jewish area near Wilshire and Fairfax in a Reconstructionist Jewish family.

In an introduction to an interview with her mother for ''Interrobang?!

Anthology on Music and Family'', Cheslow wrote that her maternal great-grandmother emigrated from Kolomea (in present-day Ukraine) and had a professional violinist father.

Cheslow's mother graduated from UCLA, became a teacher, and was an American civil rights movement advocate.

Her first fanzine was If This Goes On, co-published with Colin Sears from 1982–83, before joining Sears' band Bloody Mannequin Orchestra (BMO).

BMO combined hardcore punk with noise rock, no wave, and improvisation, and their recordings came out on WGNS.

If This Goes On featured an early Minor Threat interview.

It also featured an interview with The Raincoats.

Along with doing bands and zines, Cheslow had a radio show on freeform station WMUC-FM.

With Cynthia Connolly and Leslie Clague, she compiled the seminal photographic punk oral history book Banned In DC: Photos and Anecdotes from the DC Punk Underground (79-85) in 1988, which documented the early 1980s Washington, DC hardcore punk scene.

The book included flyers from Cheslow's punk flyer collection and some of her photographs, as well as photographs and flyers from Connolly, Clague, and others such as Lucian Perkins and Glen E. Friedman.

Cheslow's first issue of Interrobang?! was published in 1989 with a Nation of Ulysses interview.

Cheslow was also in a one-off project with Fugazi's Joe Lally.

Cheslow moved to San Francisco in 1990, continued to collaborate with musicians in D.C., and was an influence on Bikini Kill and Bratmobile.

In the 1990s she was in indie rock bands Suture (with Dug E. Bird of Beefeater and Kathleen Hanna), Red Eye (with Tim Green of Nation of Ulysses), and The Electrolettes (with Julianna Bright, later of The Quails).

Her recordings came out on Dischord Records, Kill Rock Stars, and her label Decomposition.

She played guitar and bass and was a singer and songwriter for all three bands, although Hanna was the main vocalist and lyricist for Suture.

Suture performed at the International Pop Underground Convention in Olympia, Washington in August 1991.

Cheslow's experiences with riot grrrl, while in Suture during 1991–92, inspired her to compile a list of women involved in punk that recorded from 1975 to 1980.

A retrospective Chalk Circle release, "Reflection", came out in 2011 on Mississippi Records and Post Present Medium.