Ben Shedd

Since 1970, Ben Shedd has directed, designed, and produced 30 films and co-written 19 of them. He was a member of the original production team for the PBS TV series NOVA and worked on the very first production in 1972. He shares a 1974 Peabody Award for his work as one of the producer/director writers of NOVA's second season and joined with the current NOVA staff to receive the National Science Foundation's first National Science Board Public Service Award honoring NOVA's 25 years on-the-air. Ben started his own production company Shedd Productions, Inc. in 1976 and, with Jacqueline Phillips Shedd, received the 1978 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject for his first independent film The Flight of the Gossamer Condor (1978), about the invention of history's first successful human powered airplane. Ben Shedd has produced films, live television, location video, and computer productions, and moves easily between different forms of media storytelling. He specializes in complex science subjects. He has directed, produced, written and co-edited four giant screen IMAX films - three of them produced through his production company. Ben's films have received over 40 international awards and have been shown around the world. In addition to his production work, Ben taught film for 10 years at his alma mater, the University of Southern California's acclaimed School of Cinema Television, as well as teaching at the California Institute of the Arts and Art Center College of Design. He was the 1989-90 PNM Endowed Chair Professor of Media Arts in the School of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. Ben was a Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer teaching in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University 1997-2003, doing research, teaching, and developing design criteria for effective ways to use giant screen systems in informal science education. Ben Shedd is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and has served on its Documentary and Student Academy Award nominating committees. In 1989 Ben was awarded an Alden B. Dow Creativity Fellowship to research giant screen filmmaking, and began working on a book and articles called Exploding The Frame, about designing giant screen films and digital walls.