Richard Hancock is an artist, photographer, and researcher, based in Berlin and working internationally. His multi-disciplinary practice engages with issues of power, value, consent and desire; commonly in relation to questions around social class, queerness, lineage and heritage.

Working with languages of photography, performance, drawing, installation and text; materials drawn from historical narratives, artistic legacies, and family stories are frequently mined and deployed as references.

Raised in a working class town outside of Sheffield (UK), as a teenager he was immersed in DIY zine culture and underground music. He was drawn to experimental writing processes, the hyper-embodiment of his uncle’s clandestine school-hall gym, and art as a way of being in the world that resisted pre-determined social economies. He has since lived in Nottingham (UK), San Francisco (US), and Berlin (DE).

Since 2001, he has worked together with Traci Kelly on the project hancock & kelly exploring questions of collaboration, identity, and inter-subjectivity. The resulting works have been a series of visceral and queer encounters, both moving and spectacular.

An Empire, his multi-year research project with Litsa Kiousi, is an exploration of the histories, atrocities, presents and futures of empire building. Through a collaborative dialogue, the artists map the tide of European history, and grapple with the complexity of existence in a modern empire.

In addition to his own works, Hancock has performed and danced in works by Sonia Boyce, Nao Bustamante, Guillermo Gómez Peña/La Pocha Nostra, and Patrizio Di Massimo. He choreographed and starred in the first part of Liz Rosenfeld's Surface Tension Trilogy; and photographed Isaiah Lopaz's series, Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Him.

Richard Hancock has performed, exhibited, and taught internationally at events and venues such as Arnolfini, Bristol (UK), Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt (DE), Museu de Évora (PT), Tramway, Glasgow (UK), Performance Space, Sydney (AU), the Chicago Cultural Center (US), and Nottingham Contemporary (UK).

He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards from Arts Council England, the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Kultur, Fonds Darstellende Künste, Stiftung Kunstfonds, and the Deutscher Künstlerbund. His work has been featured in publications by Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, Intellect, and the National Review of Live Art; alongside magazines and journals such as Mousse, Contemporary Theatre Review, Realtime, and Dance Theatre Journal. His work has been acquired and is held in private collections in Berlin (DE), New York City (US), Stuttgart (DE), and Adelaide (AU).

Richard Hancock’s work with Traci Kelly is held in publicly accessible archives at Dance4 (Nottingham, UK), Critical Path (Sydney, AU), Live Art Archive (Bristol, UK), Live Art Development Agency Study Room (London, UK), and as part of the Goat Island Archive in the Special Collections of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (US).

From January 2023, the hancock & kelly Archive has been housed in the Special Collections department at De Montfort University, in Leicester (UK). The archive forms part of the teaching and research at the Institute of Drama, Dance & Performance Studies.