Bill Benzon’s career runs from cognitive science, through art, music, and the web. He published Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture in 2001 and is on the scientific advisory board for the Institute of Music and Neurologic Function in New York City.
Currently an independent scholar, consultant and technical writer, Bill was a Senior Scientist with MetaLogics, Inc., where he worked on knowledge representation and information design for web-based health services. He has taught on-line with Connected Education (through the New School in New York City) and developed a web-based tribute to Martin Luther King that was recognized by Publisher’s Weekly and a tribute to Rahsaan Roland Kirk that was recognized in Esquire magazine. He has been a consultant to NASA, the U.S. Air Force, New York State, and private sector corporations.
Bill has taught in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is internationally recognized for his numerous scholarly articles, reviews, and technical reports on African-American music, literary analysis and theory, cultural evolution, cognition and brain theory, visual thinking, and technical communication. In conjunction with Richard Friedhoff he wrote a book on computer graphics and image-processing entitled Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution.
As a jazz musician, Bill plays trumpet and flugelhorn and has shared the stage with Dizzy Gillespie, B.B. King, Frank Foster, Al Grey, and Nick Brignola. He is cofounder of the New African Music Collective, a musical ensemble which has been supported by the New York State Foundation for the Arts and he has exhibited computer art in the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island.
Bill has his own blog at New Savanna, posts photos at Flickr, has publications and working papers on SSRN, and, yes, is on Facebook.