Jeff McMahon received an MFA with concentration in nonfiction from the writing program of the School of the Arts,Columbia University in 1998. His thesis project Safe as Houses: One Artist's Life in New York City 1980-95, is a memoir connecting the author's life in a low-income co-op in New York's lower east side with his involvement in the performance art comunity revolving around Performance Space 122. He read an excerpt at the Rothermere Institute, University of Oxford, as part of the 2005 conference "The U.S. in the 1980's: the Reagan Years," and received a 2009 residency at the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk NY to work on the manuscript. In 2001 he received a Monette/Horwitz Trust research grant in support of Closure: The Gay Bathhouse and Its Discontents, merging personal essay with historical research and interviews.This book is currently being shopped to publishers, with an excerpt presented at the Society for Scientific Study of Sexuality, Western Region (San Diego) 2004. In 2000 Jeff presented a paper for the visual autobiography panel of the Modern Language Association focusing on the integration of performance art with memoir. McMahon's essays on censorship, urban life, memory, Cuba, teaching, arts funding and politics have been published in Culture Wars (New Press) Poor Dancer's Almanac (Duke Univ Press), TDR/The Drama Review, Contact Quarterly, PAJ/Performing Arts Journal, Teaching Tolerance, New York Blade News, Threepenny Review, City Limits, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, and The New England Review. Two of his scripts were published in Performing the Here and Now: an Introduction to Contemporary Theater & Performance ed. Chris Danowski (Kendall-Hunt 2005)