Benjamin Kiem

Ben Kiem is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. He is interested in early cinema, and studies how larger structures of white supremacy are embedded in cinema as a technology and as an art form. He received his BA from Hampshire College in 2016, where he studied filmmaking and cinema studies. He received his MA from University of Chicago’s MAPH program in 2019.  He wrote his master’s thesis on Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World, examining how this virtual travel created an embodied ethnographic experience and trained film audiences to relate to cinema within colonial dynamics of visual mastery. Ben is particularly invested in pedagogical approaches to film studies and hybrid scholarship-filmmaking practices.