Benton C Bainbridge

After high school, Bainbridge moved to New York City and immersed himself in New York’s Lower East Side art scene while studying film and TV at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. As an undergrad, Bainbridge chose video as his primary medium and began presenting work at art spaces and clubs like Space 2B (aka “The Gas Station”) and Danceteria. Working at Rafik as an engineer, editor and salesperson introduced him to many artists, personalities, ideas and esthetics. At Rafik, Bainbridge worked on projects for Robin Byrd, Richard Kern and Boogie Down Productions' "The Bridge Is Over" video.

In 2014, Bainbridge founded Intersection Arts, LLC to continue his media design and production for museums. Intersection Arts designs immersive media for the 10th Season of "One Step Beyond"—a monthly audio visual event at American Museum of Natural History. Bainbridge has been the resident media artist, curator and visual performer for One Step Beyond since its inception in 2007, co-producing the show with Glowing Pictures for the first seven seasons.

He is faculty at School of Visual Arts MFA Computer Arts department. His work is collected in the Turbulence.org collection and The "ETC: Experimental Television Center Archives" in the Rose Goldsen Media Archives at Cornell University and The Kitchen Archive at the Getty Research Institute. From 2006-2007, Bainbridge was Education Fellow at Eyebeam. He has since realized many projects there, including the inaugural MIXER event and VHS portraits.

Bainbridge has shown his work in venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, Madison Square Garden, The Kitchen (NYC), EMPAC (Troy, NY), the American Museum of Natural History, SFMOMA (San Francisco), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Dallas Video Festival, Boston Cyberarts Festival, Eyebeam, Mercat des les Flors (Barcelona), LUX2006 (Sevilla), Auditorium Parco della Musica (Roma), Test-Portal (Amsterdam), Sonic Light (Amsterdam), Wien Modern (Vienna), Inventionen (Berlin), Teatro Colón CETC (Buenos Aires), CELCIT (Managua), Xi'an China International Horticultural Exposition 2011, Korean Festival (Seoul), Good Vibrations (Australia), and MTV Networks (global).

In 1989, Bainbridge graduated from Tisch with a Bachelor in Fine Arts. That same year his short video “Betabet” was screened at Museum of Modern Art in the Film/Video Arts 21 program and he was awarded his first residency at Experimental Television Center. As part of this residency, Bainbridge began his first live video performance experiments with collaborators Philip R. “Bulk Foodveyor” Bonner, Jonathan “Naval Cassidy” Giles, Chad Strohmayer and Andrew Koontz. These early experiments convinced Bainbridge that video art can be made much as music: in real time, in collaboration, in public, via the free manipulation of all the tools of the medium.

Benton C Bainbridge (born January 22, 1966) is an American media artist known for creating single channel video, interactive artworks, immersive installations and live visual performances with custom digital, analog and optical systems of his own design.