Benjamin Portzen (b.1998) is a composer, improviser, and movement artist who strives to make space for connection, healing, presence, and absence through immersive sound and movement works. By enabling performers and audiences to be with time differently, Ben offers the opportunity to create and interrogate relationships between bodies, ideas, sounds, and objects across, around, and through time. At present, Ben’s research interests include designing intelligent computer collaborators for composition and improvisation, illuminating the body as the locus of creative potential in the creation of sound works, the facilitation of “real” experiences for performers and audiences, and the ways in which artistic practice offers the opportunity for radical self-transformation and -dissolution.

Ben sees little boundary between artistic and religious practices, freely embracing the ritualism of repetition, and improvisation’s ability to put us in contact with the unknown by grounding oneself completely in the present. At this intersection, Ben explores the liminal space between creativity and destructivity in a process he has found to continually reveal fascinating ways in which art can help us live more connected, meaningful lives.

Ben holds a Bachelor’s of Music from Lawrence University (‘21) where he studied composition with Asha Srinivasan and Joanne Metcalf, improvisation with Matt Turner, and dance with Margaret Paek. He has served as an artist in residence with numerous esteemed organizations including the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2022, ‘23, ‘24); the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media, and Technology (CIRMMT); and Ensemble Modern. Ben is the recipient of awards including the Henry Merritt Wriston Scholarship, the Marjory Irvin Prize, and the Pi Kappa Lambda Composition Award. As a performer, Ben has toured extensively across Europe and North America with artists including Vox Rea, Duane Forrest, and Jillian McKenna, as well as with his trio Else, if Else and the Belgian new music ensemble Extended Music Collective. As a 2021 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, Ben spent one year across Europe and Canada exploring the role art can play in imagining and building a more equitable, sustainable, and compassionate future by embracing our unknowns with more fascination than fear.

Currently, Ben serves as Technical Director of Inland Ocean Cooperative, and offers private lessons and mentorship in sound, music, and arts technology in-person and online.