Ben Russell

Both a Guggenheim Fellow and participating artist in documenta 14, Russell's work has been described as drawing on elements of ethnography, psychedelia and Surrealism. • Illustration — Russell in 2014

Russell attended Brown University from 1994 to 1998, where he received a BA in art and semiotics. It was during his last year at Brown that Russell became interested in filmmaking, and shot his first film on 16mm. Afterwards, Russell traveled to Suriname with the Peace Corps. The experience inspired many of his films, and the country ended up as the setting for his first feature-length work, Let Each One Go Where He May, a film which premiered in the Tiger Awards competition at the 2010 Rotterdam International Film Festival and received the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize. Early in his career, Russell befriended the English filmmaker Ben Rivers, and the two would later co-program a touring series of their work. They have collaborated on two films together, the feature film A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013) and the experimental short The Rare Event (2018). Russell's third feature film, Good Luck (2017), premiered in the international competition at the 2017 Locarno Film Festival and was exhibited as a four-channel video installation at documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany. It was voted the "Best Experimental Film of 2017" by the National Society of Film Critics. Russell received an MFA in film and video from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. From 2006-2011, he was assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.