Matthew Chase-Daniel was born in Cambridge Massachusetts in 1965, spent his first year in the green pastures of Harvard University, then headed down to New York City through the remaining years of the 1960’s. In 1970 he headed north with his family to the rolling hills below the Berkshire Mountains where he raised tadpoles, minnows, and a raccoon, learned to fall off a horse, and hunt morels, wild violets, and rainbow trout. Following several harrowing years in an exclusive New England prep school, he reeducated himself through exhaustive readings of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Ram Dass, and found his way to the Ojai Foundation where he spent a year studying Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, Lakota Sweat Lodge ritual, and Northwest Coast carving, while growing his hair into ragged dreadlocks, eating macrobiotic food, and wearing bedsheets in the style of a South Indian ascetic monk. In the mid and late 1980’s, Chase-Daniel spent three years at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York (B.A.), and three years in Paris, France, where he studied cultural anthropology, photography, ethnographic film production, and how to speak mellifluously in French. Since 1989, he has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, renovating old houses, growing green chard, making family and art, and basking in the sun.
His photography and sculpture have been exhibited across the U.S. and in Europe and Japan. He has created public art projects in New Mexico, Colorado, Florida, and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. He is represented by Craig Krull Gallery, in Santa Monica California . He is the co-founder, co-owner, and co-curator of Axle Contemporary, in Santa Fe, New Mexico
