Ben Mendelsohn is a documentary filmmaker and media scholar interested in the intersections of critical urban studies, media theory, and coastal ecology. His article, "Making the Urban Coast: A Geosocial Reading of Land, Sand, and Water in Lagos, Nigeria” appeared in the December 2018 issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and his film criticism has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and Public Books, among others. His most recent documentary film, As If Sand Were Stone..., screened at the Rockaway Film Festival and Northwestern University's Block Museum. With colleagues at the Block, he has also initiated the "Desktop Cinema Working Group," a transnational collaborative of filmmakers, scholars, and curators investigating the use of computer screen capture in contemporary film and visual culture. He joined the School of Film following a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Environmental Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.