Chico MacMurtrie was born in New Mexico in 1961, and currently resides in New York. He received his B.F.A. from the University of Arizona and an M.F.A. in New Forms and Concepts from the University of California at Los Angeles. He has been awarded four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for Interdisciplinary Artists. Three of those have been Individual grants; one in 1988, one in 1990 and the other in 1991. The fourth grant was a collaborative grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1993 for the premiere of Trigram: A Robotic Opera , which was staged at Theatre Artaud in San Francisco. TRIGRAM was a feature story on The Next Step program on the Discovery Channel. He was a Performing Artist in Residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 1989, and in 1990 received the San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award.

In 1991, MacMurtrie completed a month long tour of Europe, funded by an Arts International grant. During that time he traveled and performed in Czechoslovakia and presented an award-winning performance at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, which appeared on television in Munich, Berlin, and Dortmund, Germany. The tour ended with performances in Amsterdam and an interactive installation at the Kijkhuis, in Den Haag, Holland. In February 1994, he was a Teaching Artist in Residence at the Chicago Art Institute. MacMurtrie was recently featured in Mark Deary's book Escape Velocity : Cyberculture at the End of the Century as well as the BBC special: Pandemonium. He recently completed a residency at the Headland's Center for the Arts and has completed work on a permanent interactive outdoor sculpture URGE for the Yerba Buena Children's Place, Growing Raining Tree for the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center's UnMuseum, and the Fœtus to Man clock in Lille France.