Barbara Benish

Barbara Benish is an artist, curator, writer and farmer. She studied Ethnography & Art at the University of Hawai’i, and Painting at Claremont Graduate University, receiving a Masters of Fine Arts in 1988. Benish has also studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm (scholarship) and Academia del Bellas Artes in Mexico. Throughout the 1980’s Benish was engaged first-hand in the historical changes in Central Europe, culminating in an exchange exhibition of Czech and U.S. artists she co-curated in 1989, the first in fifty years. She moved from Los Angeles to Prague in 1993 as a Fulbright scholar and stayed. Her artwork has been in hundreds of international exhibitions and is in permanent collections, including P.S.1 Museum in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Yale Library, the Stadtgeschichtliche Museen in Nurnberg, Germany, and the National Gallery in Prague.

Benish is Founding Director of Art Dialogue, a Czech NGO (est. 2004) which produces exhibitions, workshops, and an artist-in-residency program at ArtMill , a center focusing on sustainable art in the Czech countryside. She divides her time between šumava and California where she was a Fellow at the Social Practice Arts Research Center at University of California Santa Cruz , USA, (2013-15) and is still active. From 2010-15, Benish was Advisor on Arts, Education and Outreach to the United Nations Safe Planet Campaign on Hazardous Chemicals and Waste, and participated in numerous UN Conferences. She was a contributor to the legislation on both plastic pollution issues as well as transformative education at the U.N. Benish’s current research is focused on art and farming, on which she is co-authoring another book, to be published in 2020.

Barbara Benish lectures in both Visual Studies and teaches Studio Art.

Visual Studies

www.barbarabenish.com