Ben Balcom is a filmmaker and educator based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he is an assistant professor of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. From 2013 to 2023, he co-directed Microlights Cinema, a microcinema dedicated to experimental film and video art.
Balcom’s recent films explore the histories and afterlives of radical social ideals and communal living. Working within experimental nonfiction, his projects combine archival research, poetic narration, and observational filmmaking to reflect on the possibilities of alternative ways of living. Drawing from speculative fiction, critical theory, and utopian poetics, his work often revisits the sites of now-defunct experimental schools and intentional communities, using cinema as a space for both research and imagination. Featuring landscapes both real and imagined, these films engage collective memory while speculating on futures beyond the limits of capitalism.
Earlier in his practice, Balcom worked with abstraction, introspection, and formal experimentation, exploring the tensions between perception and communication, and probing the materiality of film itself. These threads continue to inform his evolving approach to nonfiction and poetic cinema.
Balcom’s films have screened internationally at venues and festivals including the Museum of the Moving Image, International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Arts Festival, IndieLisboa, Media City Film Festival, and Ann Arbor Film Festival. He has received awards from Onion City, Athens International Film + Video Festival, and Ann Arbor. In 2023, he was a research fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies.
Drop a line any time to benbalcom@gmail.com
