Ben Lignel is a potter, craft thinker, educator, publisher and maker living in Montreuil (France), the town of which Paris is the suburb. A jewellery maker and advocate for 25 years, Lignel co-curated also known as jewellery (2008), MirrorMirror (2011), Difference and Repetition (2013), Exposé (2017), Medusa, Jewellery and Taboos (2017) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Tableau Vivant (2018) at the Pinakothek der Moderne / the Design Museum, Munich. Alongside his curatorial practices, he started contributing essays and op-eds to magazines and publications in 2006, and became a member of Think Tank. A European Initiative for the Applied Arts, in 2009. He was the editor of Art Jewelry Forum between January 2013 and December 2016. During his tenure, Benjamin oversaw the publication of more than 350 essays, reviews and interviews, and edited three books, including the first book-length study of jewelry exhibition-making. He is guest teacher at Alchimia (Florence), the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Nürnberg), HDK-Valland (Gothenborg), and was core faculty at the M.A. in Critical Craft Studies (Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa), from the program’s inception to its end. While teaching there, he was responsible for the editing, design and production of each graduating cohort’s publication, including the program’s last retrospective publication project (www.themacrpapers.com). He is a founding member of both la garantie, association pour le bijou, an organisation dedicated to producing discourse on contemporary jewelry, and of the Knowledge House for Craft, a southern hemisphere think tank dedicated to understanding the ways in which craft lives in our contemporary world. After a twenty-year career in jewelry, Ben has steered his creative interest towards making ceramic cookware.
