Cienna Benn is a cultural worker and multidisciplinary curator from Altadena, CA. Inspired by matters of identity and image-making, her work consider the complexities of migration and intergenerational memory as expressed through collective cultural work, photography, oral history, and vernacular image archives.

Through her studies, she cares for aesthetic sensibilities in archives by lifting the collections of radical visual artists and art movements ranging from acts of self-fashioning to social activism; personal and culturally situated. She aims to express herself as a steward of inherited information through accessibility, activation, and epistemologies of care.

Benn holds a Master’s of Arts in Visual Studies from The University of California, Irvine, and is an Alumna of Howard University, where she earned her bachelor’s degrees in Africana Studies and Sociology. She is a UC-HBCU Fellowship recipient, Mellon Mays Fellow, and Beinecke Scholar. Her archival and cultural programming experience includes Library of Congress, University of California, Irvine, University of Pennsylvania, BlackStar Film Festival, and Armory Center for the Arts. She is currently the 2025 Activist Artist-in-Residence at Pitzer College and is charting interdisciplinary pathways in Library and Information Sciences.