Michael Benson

Quick Facts

Full Name	Michael Benson
Occupation	Writer
Date Of Birth	Mar 31, 1962(1962-03-31)
Age	62
Birthplace	Munich
Country	Germany
Horoscope	Pisces

Michael Benson Biography

Michael Benson is one of the most popular and richest Writer who was born on March 31, 1962 in Munich, Germany. Michael Benson, born March 31, 1962, is an American artist and writer. He also produces exhibitions.

Between 2007 and 2010, Terrence Malick worked with Benson to produce space and cosmology sequences in Malick’s The Tree of Life film. The film was based partly on Benson’s book, and other exhibition projects. The film, which examined the origins and fate of Earth’s life, was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival 2011. His work was also included in Patricio Guzman, a Chilean documentary filmmaker. Nostalgia for the Light (2011) showed similarities between astronomers who were deep into cosmological time and the struggles of Chileans still looking for the remains of their relatives killed under Augusto Pinochet.

As a writer Benson subsequently contributed articles on a diversity of topics to such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Artforum, The Nation, Interview and Rolling Stone, as well as such newspapers as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The International Herald Tribune, including many Op-Eds. His 2003 article for The New Yorker on NASA’s mission to Jupiter, “What Galileo Saw,” was selected for inclusion in the anthology The Best American Science Writing 2004 and, in 2010, in The Best of Best American Science Writing (both Ecco/HarperCollins). His July 13, 2008 Washington Post weekend Outlook section piece titled “Send it Somewhere Special” advocated retrofitting the International Space Station to convert it into an interplanetary spacecraft. The article proved to be controversial, and prompted heated reactions, with many dismissing Benson’s ideas as impractical while others supported the concept. In a previous Op-Ed, this one titled “Can the Heavens Wait?” and published by the New York Times on January 31, 2004, Benson criticized NASA for its decision, announced only days previously, not to service the Hubble Space Telescope. He advocated the immediate reinstatement of a Space Shuttle servicing mission, calling Hubble “surely the most important instrument in modern astronomy.” After a sustained campaign by many astronomers, engineers, science writers, editorialists and representatives of the public at large, a Space Shuttle mission to service the Hubble was in fact eventually reinstated. That mission, STS-125, took place in May 2009 and restored the space telescope for service until at least 2014 but probably many more years.

Benson’s second book, Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle, was published by Abrams Books in October 2009. A companion volume to Beyond, Far Out covers such deep space phenomena as nebulae, star clusters, galaxies, and galaxy clusters. It also contains a series of short “sidebar” stories that trace various epochs of Earth history and link those periods to the main astronomical subjects of the books. These shorter stories are tied to the astronomical phenomena being depicted according to the light travel time between the Earth and the deep space objects in question. Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Dennis Overbye wrote “Actually ‘exquisite’ does not really do justice to the aesthetic and literary merits of the book, published in the fall… You can sit and look through this book for hours and never be bored by the shapes, colors and textures into which cosmic creation can arrange itself, or you can actually read the accompanying learned essays. Mr. Benson’s prose is up to its visual surroundings, no mean feat.”

After the success of Predictions Of Fire, Benson began using the internet to collect photographs from deep space missions. He wrote an article about it in 2002 for The Atlantic Monthly magazine titled “A Space in Time”. This article eventually led to a contract from Harry N. Abrams (New York publisher of illustrated books).

Michael Benson Net Worth

Michael Benson is one of the richest Writer from Germany. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Michael Benson 's net worth $5 Million. (Last Update: December 11, 2023)

Benson received a Bachelor of Arts in English and a minor in Photography from the State University of New York at Albany. He worked as a news assistant at The New York Times for two years before deciding to become a freelance journalist. He began a series for Rolling Stone in 1986 that covered the opening of Soviet underground rock music scenes during “glasnost” period. These articles were either published with his photographs or images from Anton Corbijn, a noted rock photographer. In the mid-1980s, he also wrote an hour- long documentary on Russian rock for MTV titled “Tell Tchaikovsky the News”. This period saw Benson work occasionally as a photojournalist at Reuters’ Moscow bureau. He was featured in The International Herald Tribune and other publications.

In 1989 Benson enrolled in NYU Graduate Film School. He then moved to Slovenia, then still a republic under a rapidly falling Yugoslavia to make the feature documentary Predictions Of Fire (1995). After 16 years living in Slovenia, he returned to New York in 2007.

Benson later finished the TV broadcast version of a feature-length global road movie titled More Places Forever, which was shown on the German-French channel ZDF/Arte in November 2008. The film, a co-production between ZDF/Arte, TV Slovenia and Benson’s production company Kinetikon Pictures, features a visit to Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka, among many other scenes shot in locations as diverse as Mongolia, Korea, Hong Kong, the United States, and Slovenia.

Height, Weight & Body Measurements

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Who is Michael Benson Dating?

According to our records, Michael Benson married to Lisa Grasso. As of December 1, 2023, Michael Benson’s is not dating anyone.

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On January 22, Benson’s large exhibition of planetary landscapes, “Otherworlds: Visions of Our Solar System,” opened in the Jerwood Gallery of the Natural History Museum in London. Featuring a new ambient composition by Brian Eno, the show features 77 digital chromogenic prints of extraterrestrial vistas. After closing in London on May 15, “Otherworlds” will move to the Natural History Museum in Vienna for the summer of 2016.

Facts & Trivia

Michael Ranked on the list of most popular Writer. Also ranked in the elit list of famous people born in Germany. Michael Benson celebrates birthday on March 31 of every year.

Benson’s book Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes (Harry N. Abrams, 2003; paperback edition 2008; children’s edition 2009), features about 300 highly reprocessed photographs of the planets and moons of the solar system, as well as the sun. The book, which has an introduction by noted science fiction writer and space visionary Arthur C. Clarke and afterword by the award-winning American writer of non-fiction Lawrence Weschler, culled shots from five decades of space probe images and repurposed them, positioning them as a chapter in the history of photography and the landscape. It won First Prize for Design, Special Trade General Books Category at the 2004 New York Book Fair and was called “An aesthetic revelation… a spectacular melding of science and art…” (LA Times) and a “pioneering and magnificent collection of pictures… sublimely exhilarating…” (Booklist). Beyond was printed in English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. From April 2007 to April 2008, an exhibition of large-scale photographic prints based on the book was displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and was described as a “stunning series of pictures” (The New York Times) and an “extraordinary exhibition” (New York Magazine). An exhibition of Beyond images was also toured around the United States by SITES, the Smithsonian Institution’s Traveling Exhibitions Service, from 2008-2011.