Michael Benson (born March 31, 1962) is an American author, artist, filmmaker, and exhibitions producer whose most recent work centers on the convergence of art and science.

In the last fifteen years Benson has produced a series of large-scale exhibitions of digitally constructed planetary landscapes in major international museums.

During this period, Benson worked occasionally as a photojournalist for the Reuters news agency's Moscow bureau, landing front page shots in The International Herald Tribune among other publications.

As a writer, Benson subsequently contributed articles on a diversity of topics to such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Artforum,[1] The Nation, Interview, and Rolling Stone, as well as such newspapers as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The International Herald Tribune, including many editorials.

His July 13, 2008 Washington Post weekend Outlook section piece titled "Send it Somewhere Special" advocated retrofitting the International Space Station to convert it into an interplanetary spacecraft.

After a sustained campaign by many astronomers, engineers, science writers, editorialists, and representatives of the science-literate public, a Space Shuttle mission to service the Hubble was in fact eventually reinstated.

Titled "Watching Earth Burn," it used still images, video clips crafted from satellite images, and textual accompaniment to drive home the fact that many disturbing signs of [[climate change] can be seen clearly from Earth's orbit, including continent-wide smoke palls from wildfires, superstorms, and dense layers of smog obscuring the view of significant parts of India and China.

It was a procedure he wrote about for The Atlantic Monthly magazine in an article titled "A Space in Time" in 2002,[2] which eventually led to a contract with Harry N. Abrams, the New York publisher of illustrated books.

Featuring 148 prints spread across seven rooms, Beyond: Visions of Our Solar System was the largest collection of planetary landscape photography ever assembled in one place.

So it is with a shiver of awe that we view Michael Benson's large, digitally composed photographs based on pictures captured by robotic space probes."

In January 2016, Benson's large exhibition of planetary landscapes, "Otherworlds: Visions of Our Solar System," opened in the Jerwood Gallery of the Natural History Museum in London.

Benson later finished the TV broadcast version of a feature-length global road movie titled More Places Forever, which was shown on the German-French channel ZDF/Arte in November 2008.

Currently in print in four languages, the book was hailed as "dense, intense, detailed, and authoritative" by Tom Hanks, and "lively, exciting, and exhaustively researched" by Martin Scorsese.

Michael Benson is currently working with scanning electron microscope technologies at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa on a project called Nanocosmos.

In June 2023 he opened an initial visual sampling of this investigation into natural design at sub-millimeter scales in a museum exhibition at CosmoCaixa Barcelona.