After the death of both her parents (in separate car accidents) when she was nine, Mikey Cuddihy was sent to England with her siblings, where she attended Summerhill, a small progressive school in Suffolk. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art, before moving to London in 1971 to study painting at Central School of Art, and then Chelsea College of Art for her MA.
In the late 70s she moved to East London where she co-founded The Beck Road Arts Trust with Helen Chadwick, Genesis & Paula Orridge, painters Alison Turnbull, Trevor Shearer, Pete Smith, Sandra Porter, and filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski among others.
Her writing, which often appeared as fragments of conversations and texts within and alongside her paintings and installations, became a focus in 2006, when three of her stories were included in a Serpent’s Tail anthology of short fiction by artists, “The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B & Other Stories.”
She moved from East London to East Sussex in 2011, where she wrote a memoir, based on her childhood and early years as an artist. “A Conversation About Happiness” was published in 2014 by Atlantic Books, and has been optioned by Film4.
Mikey is currently writing a follow up to her memoir, set in East London in the 1980s and 90s.