Maya Benton
Curator at the International Center of Photography
Maya Benton is a curator at the International Center of Photography in New York, where she has worked since 2008. She has curated numerous traveling exhibitions, lectures widely, and is a frequent contributor to magazines and museum catalogs, where she writes about museums, photography, Israeli art, and Jewish visual and material culture.
Maya’s 2013 exhibition, Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, is traveling internationally through 2022. The show was heralded as a “revelation” by The New Yorker, ARTnews, TIME, The Financial Times and The Economist, and was praised in more than 300 international press outlets. The catalogue was named Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and the Krauszna-Krause Book Award, Europe’s top prize for photography books. She is also the author of the French monograph, Roman Vishniac. Her 2011 exhibition, Ruth Gruber: Photojournalist, is traveling through 2018.
Maya is organized Southern Rites, a traveling exhibition of photographer Gillian Laub’s contemporary images of racially segregated proms and homecoming rituals in the American South. Southern Rites examinesd the legacy of segregation and racially motivated violence through the experiences of African American teenagers.
She is a graduate of Brown University, Harvard University and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
Appears in
Watch
Reboot Ideas Presents: The Art of Visual Activism
Photographer Gillian Laub, whose exhibition Family Matters is currently on view at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, joined curator Maya Benton at the museum on March 12 to explore two decades of Laub’s work and what it means to be an artist in this moment of increasingly polarizing politics. This conversation is the first in a 2023 Reboot Ideas series of three events in the San Francisco Bay Area, supported by the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund. The series, “Art as Counterpoint to Antisemitism” foregrounds the role of arts and culture as acts of resistance to a rising tide of antisemitism. Watch the event here.
Podcasts
The False Lens of History
How has our understanding of history been curated by the choices of photographers, journalists and historians? This episode features curator at the International Center for Photography in New York Maya Benton talking about the photos of Roman Vichniac, and Yiddish scholar Eddy Portnoy discussing what he calls “The Jewish OJ trial of the 1870s” from his book, Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press.