David Cross works across performance, installation, video and photography. His practice brings together performance art and object-based environments, focusing on relationships between pleasure, the grotesque and phobia. His works often involve inflatable objects and structures that draw audiences into unexpected situations and dialogues as Cross seeks to explore contemporary experiences and understandings of participation in art.

David Cross holds a PhD from the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. Cross has exhibited extensively in New Zealand, Australia, Eastern Europe and the United Kingdom. He has performed in international live-art festivals in Poland and Croatia, and was selected as a New Zealand representative at the Prague Quadrennial in 2011. Cross was commissioned by the National Institute of Experimental Art, University of New South Wales and the City of Sydney to develop Drift, a large-scale public art commission for Taylors Square in Sydney in 2011, and his installation, Lean, was included in The Obstinate Object at Wellington City Art Gallery, 2012.

His work, Hold, was selected for inclusion in ‘Liveworks’ at Performance Space, Sydney, 2010 and featured as part of the Arts House season in the Melbourne Festival, 2012. His work, Bounce, was included in the New Zealand survey of performance ‘Mostly Harmless’ at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 2006. Cross also writes on contemporary art and his curatorial projects include the large art in public space projects One Day Sculpture across New Zealand, 2008 to 2009 (co-directed with Claire Doherty) and Iteration: Again in Tasmania, 2011.