Max Benavidez

Max Benavidez, PhD, is the author of several books, including Gronk, the definitive study of the Los Angeles artist, and was the first art critic to bring the avant-garde Chicano collective Asco into the mainstream. He has been an art critic and essayist for The Los Angeles Times and a longtime contributor to The Huffington Post and Bomb magazine in New York City. He holds a PhD in New Media, has taught at UCLA and the USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, and was both a 2016–2017 U.S. Fulbright Scholar and a 2005 Getty Arts Scholar. A playwright and now first-time film director, Benavidez has dedicated his career to exploring how culture, politics, and democracy are bound together.