Biography

Benjamin Ogrodnik grew up in the Rust Belt city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His early interest in filmmaking and in the industrial landscape of his hometown, led him to study images of/by working-class people responding to the aftermath of deindustrialization.

For his PhD dissertation, Ben researched Pittsburgh’s vibrant media community during the 1970s and 1980s. For this work he was awarded the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship in 2018-19. His current project examines images of precarious labor and environmental toxicity in recent photography, performance, and artist’s cinema, highlighting working-class artists based across the UK, Canada, Europe, and US.

His other specialties include: film curating; artist writings and the interrelated knowledge practices that artists construct within, alongside and beyond the artwork; as well as Marxist, eco-feminist and ethnographic approaches to the experimental media arts.

Ben has taught a wide array of art history, visual studies and media courses. Before joining the Cinema faculty at SUNY Binghamton, he taught and mentored MFA students and undergraduate students at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Ohio State University.

Ben’s scholarship has appeared in such journals as Screen Bodies, Film History, Feminist Media Histories, Afterimage, Film International, JUMP CUT, Contemporaneity, Journal of Curatorial Studies (forthcoming), and more. He has curated screening events at the LUX, the Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image, the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh Center for Art and Media, and the Silver Eye Center for Photography. He is a programmer for the 2020 Three Rivers Film Festival.

Education

• PhD, History of Art and Film Studies, University of Pittsburgh
  
• MA, English, The Ohio State University
• BA, English and Media Studies, Pennsylvania State University