Ben Russell (filmmaker)

Russell attended Brown University from 1994 to 1998, where he received a BA in art and semiotics.^[12] It was during his last year at Brown that Russell became interested in filmmaking,^[13] and shot his first film on 16mm. Afterwards, Russell traveled to Suriname with the Peace Corps.^[8] The experience inspired many of his films, and the country ended up as the setting for his first feature-length work, Let Each One Go Where He May, a film which premiered in the Tiger Awards competition at the 2010 Rotterdam International Film Festival and received the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize.^[14]

Early in his career, Russell befriended the English filmmaker Ben Rivers, and the two would later co-program a touring series of their work.^[13] They have collaborated on two films together, the feature film A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013)^[15] and the experimental short The Rare Event (2018).^[16]

Russell's third feature film, Good Luck (2017),^{[17][18][19][20]} premiered in the international competition at the 2017 Locarno Film Festival and was exhibited as a four-channel video installation^[21] at documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany. It was voted the "Best Experimental Film of 2017" by the National Society of Film Critics.^[22]

Russell received an MFA in film and video from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003.^[12] From 2006-2011, he was assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.