Background and career
Sir Grayson Perry (born 24 March 1960) is an English artist, writer, broadcaster, performer, drag act and singer. He is known for drag, ceramic vases and tapestries, as well as his observations of the contemporary arts scene, and for dissecting British "prejudices, fashions and foibles". Perry's vases have classical forms and are decorated in bright colours, depicting subjects at odds with their attractive appearance. There is a strong autobiographical element in his work, in which images of Perry as Claire, his female alter ego, and Alan Measles, his childhood teddy bear, often appear. He has made a number of documentary television programmes and has curated exhibitions. He has published two autobiographies, Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl (2007) and The Descent of Man (2016), written and illustrated a graphic novel, Cycle of Violence (2012), written a book about art, Playing to the Gallery (2014), and published his illustrated Sketchbooks (2016). Various books describing his work have been published. In 2013 he delivered the BBC Reith Lectures. Perry has had solo exhibitions at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Wallace Collection in London, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan. His work is held in the permanent collections of the British Council and Arts Council, Crafts Council, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Tate and Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Perry was awarded the Turner Prize in 2003. He was interviewed about the win and resulting press in Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World. In 2008 he was ranked number 32 in The Daily Telegraph's list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". In 2012, Perry was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork — the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover — to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life.
Born in 1960 into a working-class family, Perry was four years old when his father Tom left home after discovering his mother Jean was having an affair with a milkman, whom she later married and whom Perry has claimed was violent. Subsequently, he spent an unhappy childhood moving between his parents and created a fantasy world based around his teddy bear to cope with his sense of anxiety. He considers a person's early experiences are important in shaping their aesthetics and sexuality. Perry described his first sexual experience at the age of seven when he tied himself up in his pyjamas. Perry spent a short period of his school life at King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford (KEGS). Following the encouragement of his art teacher, he decided to study art. He did an art foundation course at Braintree College of Further Education from 1978 to 1979, followed by a BA in fine art at Portsmouth College of Art and Design (now the University of Portsmouth), graduating in 1982. He had an interest in film and exhibited his first piece of pottery at a New Contemporaries show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1980. In the months following his graduation, he joined the Neo Naturists, a group started by Christine Binnie to revive the "true sixties spirit – which involves living one's life more or less naked and occasionally manifesting it into a performance for which the main theme is body paint". They put on events at galleries and other venues. At this time Perry was living in squats in central London. When he left for Portsmouth in 1979, his stepfather told him "Don't come back". Perry was estranged from his mother; when she died in 2016, he did not attend her funeral.
As of 2010, he lives in north London with his wife, the author and psychotherapist Philippa Perry. They have one daughter, Florence, born in 1992. In 2015 he was appointed to succeed Kwame Kwei-Armah as chancellor of University of the Arts London. Perry is a keen mountain biker and motorcyclist.
Perry is a supporter of the Labour Party and has designed works of art to raise funds for the party. In September 2015, Perry endorsed Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election. Perry said he would back Corbyn as he was "doing something interesting for the political debate." He added: "I think he's gold." In October 2016, he said that Corbyn had "no chance of winning an election". In 2024 The Guardian reported that Perry had donated £180,000 to the party.
From an early age he liked to dress in stereotypically women's clothes and in his teens realised that he liked dressing in drag. At the age of 15, he moved in with his father's family in Chelmsford, where he began to go out dressed as a woman. When he was discovered by his father, he said he would stop but his stepmother told everyone about it, and a few months later, threw him out. He returned to his mother and stepfather at Great Bardfield in Essex.
Perry frequently appears in public dressed as a woman, and he has described his female alter-ego, "Claire", variously as "a 19th century reforming matriarch, a middle-England protester for No More Art, an aero-model-maker, or an Eastern European Freedom Fighter", and "a fortysomething woman living in a Barratt home, the kind of woman who eats ready meals and can just about sew on a button". In his work, Perry includes pictures of himself in stereotypically women's clothes: for example, Mother of All Battles (1996) is a photograph of Claire holding a gun and wearing a dress, in ethnic Eastern European style, embroidered with images of war, exhibited at his 2002 Guerrilla Tactics show. One critic has called Perry "The social critic from hell". Perry has designed many of Claire's outfits but fashion students at Central Saint Martins Art College in London take part in an annual competition to design new dresses for Claire. An exhibition, Making Himself Claire: Grayson Perry's Dresses, was held at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, from November 2017 to February 2018.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
