Dalida María Benfield


Dalida María Benfield is a media artist, researcher, and writer. In Benfield's research-based artistic and collective practices, she produces video, installation, archives, artists' books, workshops, and other pedagogical and communicative actions, across online and offline platforms. She is currently faculty in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Visual Arts program, and was a Research Fellow and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Education

Benfield holds a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in Ethnic Studies with Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Work

Dalida María Benfield's research engages questions of gender and the geo-politics of knowledge in the work of contemporary digital media artists and activists. Built from decolonial theory, transnational feminist methodology, and the sociology of global flows of information, her research and practice have resulted in the concept of "decolonial media aesthetics." Her research and writing projects have specifically taken up critical engagements with gender, race, technology, and discourses of development; artists' and activists' iteration of technology as social and epistemic interventions; and open knowledge and digital humanities, including the development of new online platforms for art, feminist research, and video archives. Her recent work has addressed the work of individual artists, such as Michelle Dizon, Fabiano Kueva, Enrique Castro Ríos, Cao Fei, and artists' collectives, including the Raqs Media Collective; as well as activist media during the global Occupy movement, the Egyptian revolution, and the global environmental and water rights movements.
A recent work of Benfield's, losarchivosdelcuerpo uses a feminist aesthetics and poetics of re-embodiment of knowledge and knowledge sharing in the mediated shadows of colonialisms. The collective project, with work contributed by international artists and authors, exhibited most recently at Huret & Spector Gallery, Emerson College, Boston ; and SALASAB, Bogotá, Colombia, co-designed with the artist Robert Ochshorn takes the form of an open access archive of art and writing, an installation of video, photographs, and drawings, as well as a video screening series, workshops, and print publications. The

Videos of lectures/conversations