About
Benita Raphan (1962-2021) was an interdisciplinary filmmaker and artist who searched for answers about where creative ideas come. She lived and worked in London, Paris, and New York City, and made short experimental films.
Raphan earned a B.A. in media arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York — where she also taught for the last 15 years — and an M.F.A. from the Royal College of Art in London. She spent 10 years in Paris, working as a graphic designer for fashion companies like Marithé & François Girbaud, before returning to New York in the mid-1990s.
A self-described cinematic diarist and experimental biographer, Benita Raphan made a series of ‘genius’ films celebrating the inner workings of creative and inventive minds. Her subjects included Paul Erdös, R. Buckminster Fuller, John Nash, Edwin Land, Helen Keller, and Emily Dickinson. Raphan’s lifelong fascination with exploring where ideas come from and unraveling the mysterious relationship between brain science and creativity is the consistent thread running throughout her diverse projects and informing her experimental, collaborative, process of filmmaking and discovery.
All of Raphan’s films have been produced independently. Many of them have appeared on the Sundance Channel, with some presented on HBO, PBS, and Channel 4 Television in the U.K. A documentary about Raphan and her work aired on Independent Film Channel / Canada. Her films have been screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, the Telluride Film Festival, and AFI/Silverdocs, as well as Harvard University, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 2008, a retrospective of Raphan’s work was shown at the Hamptons Film Festival, the same year a collection of her films was purchased by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Her work is also in London’s British Film & Video Artists’ Film Study Collection and New York’s Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.
Her first film won an award from the British Arts Council, and her second was given a full production grant from Channel 4 Television UK and the British Arts Council. Among other awards and honors, Raphan has received three residencies at MacDowell (2004, 2005, and 2006), a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2014), and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Film (2019).
Recently, Raphan became increasingly engaged with the politics of literacy and motivated by a desire to give girls and women greater voice and confidence. Funded by a 2018 grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and New York State Foundation for the Arts, Raphan ran a hands-on language and literacy workshop for families in collaboration with the New York Public Library. The content for this was inspired by research for her Emily Dickinson film, Up to Astonishment.
LINKS
“She was an iconoclast even back in the early 1980s—the first person I knew who had her nose pierced. And she had a cool name.”
“Benita’s films have an ineffable authenticity, each one a uniquely layered equation that weaves form and content in ways that are unpredictable, complex, and viscerally compelling. ”
“Benita Raphan is a filmmaker with an unusual view of the world. Her ability to go deep into the creative mind and help her audience to understand intuitive ideas without literal explanations is an art form in and of itself.”
“Benita had a wonderful way of flipping the way we think about a biographical film...What she wanted to do was take you into the mind of these geniuses, imagine their thought processes and present that visually.”