Poet, author and performer William Cody Maher was born to a working class family in San Francisco in 1950. After having moved to New York in the early 1980s, Maher met film director Alexandre Rockwell and together they produced the films Lenz (1982) and Hero (1983), which were both screened at the Berlin film festival. In the mid-1980s Maher joined forces with photographer Susan Schwartzenberg in their photo installation My Name is Hunter’s Point, which explores Maher’s childhood in San Francisco and was shown in his native town, Heidelberg and Berlin. From 1987 to 1998 Maher made Berlin his home and worked with poet Dimitir Prigov and musician Natalia Pschenitschnikowa and, a couple of years later, with dancer and choreographer Tony Rizzi. Peter Engstler published Maher’s books Geisterstadt (2006) and Spielsachen (2009) in German translations by Carl Weissner and Walter Hartmann. In 2010 Maher travelled to the US with photographer Signe Mähler, where they shot their documentary Down Southern Roads, a road movie through America’s troubled South. Down Southern Roads was also published as a book by Peter Engstler in 2011. Recent works include a collaboration with the jazz musician Jochen Seiterle on the CD Blind Date with Love (Fixcel Records, 2016) and the literary works The Return (Moloko Print Verlag, 2020) and Venetian Blinds (Peter Engstler Verlag, 2016). Maher continues to live and work in Berlin.
Confessions of a Makeup Artist, published by Moloko Plus in 2024, is the latest collaboration of William Cody Maher and Signe Mähler. Elegantly designed by rag, Wien, the book combines a broad selection of Maher’s poems in English, a choice of photos by Mähler and a postscript (in German) by Martin Jankowski.