Jose Luis Benavides is a Latinx and queer video artist, and photographer. He has served as a lecturer at Vanderbilt University and as an adjunct at Tennessee State University. He is currently an adjunct for the City Colleges of Chicago. He has worked as a teaching artist with the National Museum of Mexican Art, Young Chicago Authors, Chicago Arts Partnership in Education, Nashville Public Library, and Chicago Public Library.

Bringing archival collections to life through moving images and mixed media installations, he engages a range of personal-to-institutional archives in order to participate in and preserve cultural memory. Through deep engagements with familial histories, marginalized histories and social movements, histories of the mental health industry, intergenerational and intercultural solidarity work alongside contemporary prison abolition work, his practice serves as a means of redress and healing, facing the tensions and traumas of our past, while working toward safer and communal futures.

He has created commissioned work for the Chicago Film Archives (2023), Kindling Arts + Defy Film Festival (2022), and the Illinois Humanities’ Envisioning Justice: An Exhibition (2019). His work has been viewed internationally, in Brussels, Hungary, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, and Turkey. He has had solo screenings at the International Museum of Surgical Science (2024), Heaven Gallery (2023), The Nightingale Cinema (2022), and Biquini Wax (2019), with a forthcoming solo exhibition at Begonia Labs (a project of Engine for Art, Justice and Democracy at Vanderbilt University). His first solo exhibition was at Terremoto magazine’s La Postal (2018).

He exhibited and screened at the Chicago Art Department (2023), Far Out Fest (2023), Tennessee State University (2023), Northern Illinois University (2023), Defy Film Festival (2022), Humboldt Intn’l Film Festival (2022), COOP Gallery (2021), SculptureCenter (2020), Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research (2020), Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ Intn’l Film Festival (2020), Full Spectrum Features’ Chicago Cinema Exchange: Mexico City (2020), Onion City: Experimental Film and Video Festival (2020), Michigan State University’s Latinx Film Festival (2020), University of Massachusetts’ Revolutions Per Minute Festival (2020), Mizna’s Arab Film Festival (2019), Something Wicked Film Festival (2019), CinHomo: Muestra Internacional de Cine y Diversidad Sexual LGBTI (2019), Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival (2019), Cadence Video Poetry Festival (2022, 2019), University of Chicago’s Screenshare Gallery (2019), Qalandiya International (2018), and The Overlook Place (2017).

He presented his work for artists talks, conferences, panels, and lectures at the Chicago Public Library (2023), Gerber/Hart Library and Archives (2022), the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures summit (2021), Colloque arts et médias de l'Université de Montréal (2020), Arts Alliance Illinois’ One State Arts Conference (2020), Tlaxcala 3 (2019), Art Institute of Chicago’s Block Party (2018), the Chicago Archives + Artists Festival (2018), American Studies Association Conference (2018), and for Mutual Interpretations at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2017).

For 8 years he served as a music and arts journalist editing for Gozamos.com, while writing for Remezcla.com, and Newcity. His published work as an artist and scholar can be read in peer-reviewed academic journals, book chapters, magazines, newspapers, and online publications such as; Visual Arts Research - University of Illinois Press (2022), TRUTHOUT (2022), Global Center for Advanced Studies - Latin America (2022), Bloomsbury Publishing (2020), Festina Publicaciones (2020), Inclusive Museum (2018), and Praxis Center: Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College (2018), VideoVideoZine (2016), Gothic Angel Clothing blog (2016), Columbia College (2013), and Kurimanzutto gallery (2011).

He received several grants, fellowships, and awards in recent years, including; an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts Regional Regrantor Program - Ignite Fund/3Arts award (2022), a Vanderbilt University - Creative Catalysts grant, Service-Learning and Civic Engagement Faculty Research Fellowship (2021), several grants from the Illinois Humanities (2020, 2019).

As part of his ongoing research into moving image practices between video-art, experimental documentary, new media, and visual anthropology, in 2018, he founded the platform, Sin Cinta Previa: Latinx & Queer Archive Video Series, for which he was awarded several grants from Hyde Park Arts Center - Artists Run Chicago (2021), Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts Regional Regrantor Program - Propeller Fund (2019), and the POWER Project grant from the Art Leaders of Color Network (2018). He has curated art exhibitions and programmed public Stove Works (2023), Hyde Park Art Center (2022), 6018|North (2019), filmfront (2020, 2019, 2018), Zakaib (2019), and Comfort Station (2021, 2018). He has also curated and organized arts programming at Threewalls (2018) and Read/Write Library (2018).

Benavides holds a degree of Master of Fine Arts in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2017) and a degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (2008). He was born-and-raised in the Chicago neighborhood of Logan Square.