Gregory Whitehead

Work

Allen S. Weiss considers him to be a major international figure in the fields of audio and radio art, from the 1980s to the present.

Active in cassette culture during the 1980s, his early works include Disorder Speech (1985), Display Wounds (1986), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1987), The Pleasure of Ruins (1988), Writing On Air (1988) and Reptiles and Wildfire (1989). In 1991, RRRecords released a 7” vinyl record titled Vicekopf.

Whitehead collaborated with Christof Migone on the 1995 radio play, The Thing About Bugs, for New American Radio. Other radioplays from the 1990s include Pressures of the Unspeakable (1992), Nothing But Fog (1996) and Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered (1997).

Since 2000, Whitehead has produced numerous plays and documentary essays for BBC Radio, including The Marilyn Room (2000), American Heavy (2001), The Loneliest Road (2003), On One Lost Hair (2004), No Background Music (2005), The Day King Hammer Fell From The Sky (2007) and Bring Me The Head of Philip K. Dick (2009). The Loneliest Road and No Background Music (featuring Sigourney Weaver) both won Sony Gold Academy Awards.

In 2001 the independent producer Gregory Whitehead made a generous private donation to the Åke Blomström Award.

Whitehead has also been a speaker at various conferences and festivals.

Awards and honors

1992 Pressures of the Unspeakable received a Prix Italia award.

1993 Shake, Rattle, Roll received the BBC Newcomer Award at the Prix Futura competition in Berlin.

1995 "The Thing About Bugs", special commendation, Prix Futura

2004 "The Loneliest Road", Sony Gold Radio Academy Award

2006 "No Background Music", Sony Gold Radio Academy Award

2015 "On the Shore Dimly Seen", short-listed for Prix Italia