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Ben Balcom Headshot

Ben Balcom

  • Professor, Film, Video, Animation and New Genres
  • Graduate Program Representative, Film, Video, Animation and New Genres
  • Chair, Graduate Faculty Committee

Education

MFA, Film, UW-Milwaukee, 2015

Biography

Ben is a filmmaker and educator based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he is a professor of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

His most recent films explore the histories and afterlives of radical social ideals and communal living. These projects combine archival research and various modes of filmmaking to reflect on alternative ways of living. Drawing from speculative fiction, critical theory, and utopian poetics, his work often revisits the sites of now-defunct experimental schools and intentional communities, using cinema as a space for both research and imagination. Featuring landscapes both real and imagined, these films engage collective memory while speculating on futures beyond the limits of capitalism.

Earlier in his practice, Balcom worked with abstraction, introspection, and formal experimentation, exploring the tensions between perception and communication, and probing the materiality of film itself. These threads continue to inform his evolving approach to nonfiction and poetic cinema.

Balcom’s films have screened internationally at venues and festivals including the Museum of the Moving Image, International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Arts Festival, IndieLisboa, Media City Film Festival, and Ann Arbor Film Festival. He has received awards from Onion City, Athens International Film + Video Festival, and Ann Arbor. In 2023, he was a research fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies.

He also co-founded Microlights Cinema, a microcinema that ran from 2013 to 2023, dedicated to bringing experimental film and video art to audiences in Milwaukee.

Links

Recent & Selected Works

View of side of a house in late evening with three windows lit up from inside
still from The Phalanx (2025)
Image of a street at night with lit street lights
still from The Phalanx (2025)
An empty classroom with two windows and a blank rolling chalkboard
still from Growing Up Absurd (2023)
Black and white image of a building taken from a distance, hills in the background
still from Looking Backward (2022)
Black and white fresco of a stylized bird with leaves and flowers around it
still from News From Nowhere (2020)
excerpt from The Phalanx (2025, 16mm>digital video, 14 minutes)
News From Nowhere (2020, 16mm>digital video, 9 minutes)

Awards

2025 Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Award, Milwaukee, WI

Grants/Funded Research

2025 Advancing Research and Creativity Grant, UW-Milwaukee