In the Courts of the Sun

Brian D'Amato received a BA from Yale and an MA from the City University of New York. He has shown his paintings, sculptures and interactive installations at galleries and museums in the U.S. and abroad including the Whitney Museum, the Wexner Center for Contemporary Art, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1992 he co-curated a show at the Jack Tilton Gallery in New York that was the first gallery show exploring the then-new medium of 'virtual reality.'

He has written for magazines including Harper's Bazaar, Index, Vogue, Flash Art, and most frequently Artforum, and has taught art and art history at City University of New York, The Ohio State University, and Yale. While working at an art gallery in New York City, Brian wrote Beauty, a thriller about cosmetic surgery. It was published in 1992 and became a best-seller in the U.S. and abroad, also translated into several popular languages. Dean Koontz called it "The best first novel I have read in a decade."

Brian has always been interested in Maya art and culture and in 1993 he started working on The Sacrifice Game trilogy, a set of thrillers which take place partly in A.D. 664, at the beginning of the ancient Maya's Late Classic period, and which incorporate consciousness projection through time and recombinant game theory. The first novel in the series, In the Courts of the Sun, was published by Dutton in the U.S. on March, 26, 2009. Foreign editions published so far include German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Romanian, and Ukranian. The second novel in the series, The Sacrifice Game, was published by Dutton in the U.S. on July 5th, 2012. Beauty was republished by Little, Brown and Company's Mulholland Classics line in the U.S. on March 12, 2013.

A percentage of Brian's after-tax profits on The Sacrifice Game trilogy project help support environmental, educational, and archaeological projects in the Maya area.

Brian can usually be found either in New York, Michigan, or Chicago, often with his Labrador Retriever, Woofy.