Michael Benson

Michael Benson (born March 31, 1962) is an American author, artist, filmmaker, and exhibitions producer whose most recent work centers on the convergence of art and science. In the last fifteen years Benson has produced a series of large-scale exhibitions of digitally constructed planetary landscapes in major international museums. His most recent book, Space Odyssey, is a detailed nonfiction examination of the production of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The book's publication was timed to coicide with the 50th anniversary of the film's theatrical release. Benson has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone. He is currently using scanning electron microscope technologies at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa to view and photograph natural objects for a book and exhibition project titled Nanocosmos. He is a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities, a Weizmann Institute Advocate for Curiosity, and was recently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Bits and Atoms at the MIT Media Lab.