Awards & Winners

Sadie Benning

Date of Birth 11-April-1973
Place of Birth Milwaukee
(Wisconsin, United States of America, Area code 414)
Nationality United States of America
Also know as S. Benning, S. Benning
Profession Film director, Musician, Visual Artist, Actor
Sadie Benning is a video maker, visual artist, and musician. She first made her name in the early 1990s as a teenage video maker from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Raised by her mother in inner-city Milwaukee, Benning left school at age 16, primarily due to the homophobia she experienced. Her earliest works, made from the time she was 15, were shot with the Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera, which recorded pixelated, black and white video images onto standard audio cassettes. The Fischer-Price PXL-2000 camera used in her early works that brought her to the spotlight was a Christmas gift from her father, experimental filmmaker James Benning. At first Sadie was standoffish to the PixelVision camera. "I thought, 'This is a piece of shit. It's black-and-white. It's for kids. He'd told me I was getting this surprise. I was expecting a camcorder." The majority of her shorts combined performance, experimental narrative, handwriting, and cut-up music to explore, among other subjects, gender and sexuality. Her work was twice included in the Whitney Biennial. Sadie’s earlier videos, A New Year, Living Inside, Me and Rubyfruit, Jollies, and If Every Girl Had a Diary all use Benning’s isolated surroundings and the effect this had on her as the main focus. In her earliest work, A New Year Sadie shies away from the front of the camera, using her surroundings - primarily the confines of her room and her bedroom window - to portray her feelings of angst, confusion and alienation. Sadie said in an interview, “I don’t talk, I’m not physically in it, it’s all handwritten text, music; I wanted to substitute objects, things that were around me, to illustrate the events. I used objects in the closest proximity – the television, toys, my dog, whatever”

Awards by Sadie Benning

Check all the awards nominated and won by Sadie Benning.