Events, talks and tours

Artist Bio

Michael Benson’s work focuses on the intersection of art and science. It spans a range of media, from large-format photographic images to nonfiction books and essays, illustrated books, films and visual-effects sequences. Over the last decade, Benson has staged a series of increasingly ambitious shows of digitally-constructed extraterrestrial landscapes, both in museums and art galleries worldwide. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other venues. A recent Visiting Scholar at the MIT Media Lab, Michael Benson is a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities. For the last few years Benson has been using scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) to focus on natural design at sub-millimeter scales for a project titled Nanocosmos.

Guest Speaker Bio

Ann Thomas was Senior Curator of Photographs and Interim Chief Curator at the National Gallery of Canada, retiring in March 2021. She is currently working as an independent expert on the history of photography and as a curator of photographs.

Over her career of more than forty years she has lectured, participated on panels and juries, done portfolio reviews, organized numerous exhibitions and installations and is the author of several catalogues and publications Among the major publications she has authored are Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science (1997) Lisette Model (1990), No Man’s Land: The Photographs of Lynne Cohen (2001) and more recently The Extended Moment: Fifty Years of Collecting Photographs at the National Gallery of Canada (2018). Max Dean: Portrait of the Artist as Artist September 2022-March 2023 (Portrait Gallery of Canada – online). She is currently researching and writing on the work of Canadian artist, Spring Hurlbut.

Curator Bio

Paul Roth has been Director of The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University since 2013. Previously, he served as Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC; as Executive Director of The Richard Avedon Foundation in New York; and as archivist of the Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Since 1990, he has organized (or co-organized) more than 100 museum exhibitions and film programs, including Stories from the Picture Press: Black Star Publishing Co. and The Canadian Press (2023-2024); Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story (2018); Jim Goldberg: Rich and Poor (2018); Edward Burtynsky: Oil (2009); and Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power (2008). He is author and co-editor of Gordon Parks: Collected Works (Steidl, 2012), among many other titles.