Sadie T. Benning (born April 11, 1973) is an American artist, who has worked primarily in video, painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and sound. Benning creates experimental films and explores a variety of themes including surveillance, gender, ambiguity, transgression, play, intimacy, and identity. They became a known artist as a teenager, with their short films made with a PixelVision camera that have been described as "video diaries". Benning was a co-founder and a former member of the American electronic rock band Le Tigre, from 1998 until 2001. Early life Sadie Benning was born April 11, 1973 in Madison, Wisconsin. Benning was raised by their mother in inner-city Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Their parents divorced before they were born, their father is film director James Benning. Benning left high school at age 16, due to homophobia. They have identified as non-binary. Work Early work Benning began creating visual works at age 15, they started filming with the "toy" video camera they received as a Christmas gift from their father, the experimental filmmaker James Benning. Benning used a Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camera, also known as PixelVision, which created pixelated black and white video on standard audio cassette tapes. At first, Benning was standoffish to the PixelVision camera and is quoted as saying, "I thought, 'This is a piece of shit. It's black-and-white. It's for kids. He'd told me I was getting this surprise. I was expecting a camcorder." They made four short films and brought them to their father's film class he was teaching at Cal Arts, and they screened the films for the first time in front of a class. One of the students put one of the films in a film festival he was organizing. By the age of 19, they had shown their films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Sundance Institute, and at international film festivals. Themes The majority of Benning's shorts combined performance, experimental narrative, handwriting, and cut-up music to explore, among other subjects, gender and sexuality. Benning's work has been included in the Whitney Biennial on four occasions (1993, 2000, 2006), and they were the youngest artist included in the well-known and controversial 1993 Whitney Biennial. Benning's earlier videos – A New Year, Living Inside, Me and Rubyfruit, Jollies, and If Every Girl Had a Diary - used Benning's isolated surroundings and the effect this had on Benning as a focus for their theme. In