James Benning (film director)

James Benning (born 1942) is an independent filmmaker from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Over the course of his 40-year career Benning has made over twenty-five feature-length films that have shown in many different venues across the world.

The Benning family lived in a German working class community. His father was Roman Benning and his mother was Anita Friedrich. Roman worked on the assembly line for a heavy industry corporation which, when James was born, was building landing gear for the U.S. military. Roman later became a self-taught building designer, as was his father. Anita, who had worked as a secretary before getting married, did some clerical work for Roman in addition to homemaking and raising James and his older brother John. James Benning's only child is the artist Sadie Benning, born in 1973.

Benning played baseball for the first twenty years of his life, and earned an undergraduate and master's degree in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, which he attended on a baseball scholarship. Benning experienced a political awakening and racial consciousness during the late 1960s, participating in civil rights protests led by Father James Groppi in segregated Milwaukee. Benning dropped out of graduate school to forfeit his military deferment since his friends, who were mostly not in school, were being drafted and dying in Vietnam. Benning instead joined the War on Poverty, teaching children of migrant workers in Colorado how to read and write, and helping to start a commodities food program that fed people living in poverty in the Missouri Ozarks. Benning often uses this background as part of his film work.

At the age of 33 Benning received an MFA from the University of Wisconsin where he had studied with David Bordwell. For the next four years he taught filmmaking at Northwestern University, University of Wisconsin, University of Oklahoma and the University of California, San Diego.

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