Christopher Joshua Benton
Abu Dhabi
Bio
Christopher Joshua Benton is an American artist based in Miza, Abu Dhabi, working in socially engaged art and installation. He collaborates with academics, architects, scientists, and everyday people to imagine new ways of living and create new sites of knowledge production. Inspired by his 11 years living in the United Arab Emirates, he researches how the homeland endures inside immigrant populations.
Current long-term artistic research projects include spearheading an archive of Black dance with scientists from MIT’s Immersion Lab, with funding from Meta and the Brooklyn Museum; designing a public park for the government of Abu Dhabi; and heading a team of architects and urbanists to re-imagine overcrowded low-income housing in the United Arab Emirates.
His exhibitions have been presented at museums, biennials, and art fairs around the world, including the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, Fikra Graphic Design Biennial (Sharjah, UAE), and Abu Dhabi Art: Beyond Emerging (59th Venice Biennale). Further projects have been exhibited at Jameel Arts Centre (Dubai, UAE), 421 Art Campus (Abu Dhabi, UAE), Dubai Design Week, and BLOCKHOUSE (Tokyo, Japan), among others. His art and research have been televised on the BBC and CNN, and featured in print with GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, and Architectural Digest.
While in Cambridge, he earned a master’s degree in Art, Culture, and Technology from MIT and studied at Harvard, receiving the Obermayer Prize and the Harold & Arlene Shnitzer Prize. He has participated in programs and fellowships with the University of Georgia as a HOPE Scholar, the University of Oxford as a Gilman Scholar, and the Rhode Island School of Design as a Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation fellow. He is the former global creative director for Huawei.