Benjamin Goldman & Daniel Gamburg celebrating their Smithsonian work with Director Emeritus, National Museum of American History, John Gray.

Artist’s Statement
When I was ten I created an animated film which started with The Big Bang, traced Darwin's Theory of Evolution, summarized humankind's major technological achievements, and ended with nuclear apocalypse—and lots of sprinkled glitter. I was intrigued by the history of the cosmos, and the magic of stop-motion animation. At Hampshire College I codified my curiosities, combining documentary film studies with animation to yield docu-animation. With a grant from the Princess Grace Foundation, I built life-sized stop-motion figures of my grandparents to visualize audio recordings of them talking about the loss of their home of fifty years. It was a unique technical and emotional challenge—one which my particular upbringing had prepared me for. My mom is an Art Therapist who works with children and seniors to give voice to their unexpressed emotions. She taught me the importance of creative expression. In addition to being a headache specialist, my dad builds, crashes, and rebuilds airplanes. From him I learned the value of dreams, perseverance… and duct tape. The docu-animated film won many awards and led me to CalArts where I earned an MFA in experimental animation and developed a digital cut-out technique I would later use to animate production art for the celebrated Lemony Snicket’s A series of Unfortunate Events end title sequence—and for numerous A+E / History projects. These days I’m still wrestling with big ideas, animating prehistoric lemurs for IMAX documentaries, bringing science and history to life for Smithsonian and National Archives films, and developing projects which look on the brighter side of the dark expanse that is the universe—with slightly less sprinkled glitter.