Cliff Watson (he/him) graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in creative writing and poetics from the University of Washington Bothell, where he was co-curator and host of the Gamut Literary Series. His hybrid-form thesis, 6-foot pine: life and romance in the chrondemic age, explored the crossing of personal, cultural, technological, and fantastical boundaries in a pandemic and climate change afflicted world. Inspired by this experience, Cliff moved on to an MS in communication and media at RPI and dove into topics related to multi-media theater and narrative, as demonstrated by his recent multi-media theatrical production (and human subject research thesis topic), Am I Enough of Me, at the EMPAC Theater. He also holds a Bachelor of Science from Brown University and a Master of Science from UW Seattle in applied mathematics.

Cliff writes prose, scripts, poetry, and lyrics, and creates hybrid experiments with digital media, coding, and live performance. He has performed over 30 roles as a singer-actor in opera, musical theatre, and other genres. In 2017, his spoken-word piece, Dialogue about croquet in a library, set to music by Lili Kung, was performed by acrobats in a handstand circus act in Acro-biographies. In 2019, Cliff explored song, screenplay, cartoon, and haibun, in his chapbook, Transformation. His poetics paper and technological autobiography, Airtime, exploring an artistic methodology to resist the medical-industrial complex and reclaim the self, was published in the journal The Crow (2020). Several pieces, including found poetry, haibun, script-memorial, lyric essay, and augmented reality video art, have been published in Clamor magazine and on Nokturno.fi. Several poems and digital media pieces have received McKinney writing contest awards at RPI. Recently a teaching assistant in human-computer interaction, as well as the RPI writing center for undergrads, grads, and faculty, Cliff was a program manager, test engineer, and software engineer for over twenty years. He has also been an opera soloist, professional chorister, musical theatre actor, olde-tyme commercial reenactor, circus set builder, digital-flow editor, and an Assistant Career Advisor in UW Bothell’s Career Services department. Cliff has lived in Washington State, Hong Kong, and now upstate New York.

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