Dalida María Benfield

Profile

Dalida María Benfield is a media artist and researcher who produces video, installations, archives, artists’ books, workshops, and other pedagogical and communicative actions, across online and offline platforms and often, collectively.

Her current work, “los archivos del cuerpo (body files)” explores a decolonial feminist aesthetics and the poetics of knowledge sharing, taking the form of an online platform, an open access archive of art and writing, an installation, a video screening series, workshops, and print publications. Alongside her teaching in the VCFA Visual Art program, she is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where her research is on the politics and poetics of online video. Previously, she taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and from 1994 – 2007, she was a member of the artists’ collective, Video Machete, which created open access media centers and free workshops as a practice of liberatory pedagogy. She collaborates extensively with transnational feminist research and activist media networks. Her work has exhibited internationally at the Espacio Parqueadero, Museo del Banco de La Republica, Bogotá, Colombia; Arte Nuevo Interactiva, Merida, Mexico; Galeria Arsenal, Bialystok, Poland; and in the U.S., the Fredric Jameson Gallery, Duke University; Playspace Gallery, California College of Art, San Francisco; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. She writes and lectures extensively on decolonial and feminist media, and recent publications include “Flow” in Social Text/Periscope (July 2013), as well as chapters in Estéticas Descoloniales (Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, 2012), Mapping Latina/o Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); Art and Social Justice Education: Culture as Commons (Routledge, 2012); and Making Our Media: Global Initiatives Toward a Democratic Public Sphere (Hampton Press, 2009). She has a Ph.D. (2011) from the University of California-Berkeley in Ethnic Studies with Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, and an MFA (1989) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.