An artist, author and filmmaker, Michael Benson has pursued a wide-ranging creative practice. His work spans a range of media, from large-format photographic and micrographic prints to nonfiction books and essays, illustrated books, films and visual-effects sequences. Following an influential period of engagement with the avant-gardes of the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, captured in feature articles for Rolling Stone magazine and his award-winning feature-length documentary Predictions of Fire (1995),

Benson turned his attention to the intersection of art and science in the 2000s. Over the last two decades, he has staged a series of large-scale exhibitions of extraterrestrial planetary landscapes at venues including the American Museum of Natural History in New York (2007); the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC (2010); the Natural History Museum in London (2016); and The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University (2025). Benson’s highly regarded books include Beyond (2003); Far Out (2009);  Planetfall (2012); and Cosmigraphics (2014)—all for Abrams.

His new book, Nanocosmos: Journeys in Electron Space, also for Abrams, is a visual examination of natural design at sub-millimeter scales using scanning electron microscope technologies. Benson contributed to, and in some cases supervised the production of, visionary cosmology sequences in Terrence Malick’s films The Tree of Life (2011) and Voyage of Time (2016). His touring exhibition Otherworlds featured an original hour-long ambient composition provided by Brian Eno. Benson’s previous book, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece (Simon & Schuster, 2018), recounts the making of Kubrick’s 1968 classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Benson has had solo gallery shows in New York and London and is currently represented in the United Kingdom by Flowers Gallery.

His non-UK print sales agent can be reached at bensonprints1@gmail.com. Benson’s limited-edition prints are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri; the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts; and many corporate and private collections. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and many other venues.

A recent Visiting Scholar at the Center for Bits and Atoms at the MIT Media Lab, Michael Benson is a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities.