Christopher Joshua Benton is an American artist, lecturer, and scholar based in Abu Dhabi. Focusing on socially engaged art, Benton collaborates with academics, architects, scientists, and communities to imagine new ways of living. Inspired by his own 12 years living in the United Arab Emirates, Benton researches how a sense of homeland endures inside immigrant populations. This expertise has resulted in large-scale interventions at Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, Abu Dhabi Art, and the Fikra Graphic Design Biennial.
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Artistic research projects include spearheading an archive of Black dance with scientists from MIT’s Immersion Lab via funding from Meta and Brooklyn Museum; designing a public park for the government of Abu Dhabi; and heading a team of architects and urbanists to reimagine low-income housing in the United Arab Emirates. His research on Black foodways and material culture in the Nation of Islam has been published in journals with MIT Press as well as Mapping Malcolm, a book on Malcolm X published by Columbia University Press.

Benton is a graduate of the master’s program in Art, Culture, and Technology at MIT, where he earned the Obermayer Prize and Harold & Arlene Snitzer Prize. He attended Oxford University as a Gilman Scholar and has a BA from the University of Georgia. He is the winner of Meta’s Emerging Black Visionary Prize. He is the former creative director of Huawei, where he developed the first-ever internal creative team for China’s largest company, managing all creative output across 25 offices in the MENASA region.

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