Sadie Benning

Who is Sadie Benning?

Sadie Benning is a video maker, visual artist, and musician.

She first made her name in the early 1990s as a teenage video maker from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Raised by her mother in inner-city Milwaukee, Benning left school at age 16, primarily due to the homophobia she experienced. Her earliest works, made from the time she was 15, were shot with the Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera, which recorded pixelated, black and white video images onto standard audio cassettes. The Fischer-Price PXL-2000 camera used in her early works that brought her to the spotlight was a Christmas gift from her father, experimental filmmaker James Benning. At first Sadie was standoffish to the PixelVision camera. "I thought, 'This is a piece of shit. It's black-and-white. It's for kids. He'd told me I was getting this surprise. I was expecting a camcorder." The majority of her shorts combined performance, experimental narrative, handwriting, and cut-up music to explore, among other subjects, gender and sexuality. Her work was twice included in the Whitney Biennial.

In Sadie’s earlier works, A New Year, Living Inside, Me and Rubyfruit, Jollies, and If Every Girl Had a Diary all use Benning’s isolated surroundings and herself as the main focus in her videos. In her earliest work, A New Year Sadie shies away from the front of the camera, using her surroundings, which was primarily the confines of her room and her bedroom window, to portray her feelings of angst, confusion and alienation. Sadie said in an interview, “I don’t talk, I’m not physically in it, it’s all hand written text, music; I wanted to substitute objects, things that were around me, to illustrate the events. I used objects in the closest proximity – the television, toys, my dog, whatever”