Benjamin Steger

Roles: Director

Benjamin Steger is a filmmaker and educator, working in documentary, fiction, and experimental forms. His most recent documentary, Stage Four: A Love Story, won the 2016 Best International Feature Length Documentary Award at the DOCfeed Documentary Festival in the Netherlands, the 2015 Award of Merit for Best Documentary Feature at the 69th Annual University Film and Video Association’s national conference, was a 2015 Spotlight Gold Award winner   and received an International Award of Excellence from the International Film Festival for Spirituality, Religion, and Visionary in Jakarta, Indonesia. His previous documentary feature, Left Field, was an official selection of the Austin Film Festival, the Kansas International Film Festival, and Dallas Videofest among many others. An article about the film was featured on the front page of the Chicago Reader, Chicago’s weekly alternative newspaper and the Chicago Sun-Times reviewed the film favorably.

Film critic Robert Butler featured Steger’s short fiction film, Great Bend, in the Kansas City Star as a “Critic’s Pick for Best of Festival” when it played at the Kansas City Filmmaker’s Jubilee in 2006.  Stewards of the Parks, a short documentary he directed and produced for Mason’s Center for Climate Change Communication and the National Park Service won the 2015 award for Best Film in the Hope Category at the International Film Festival for Climate Change in Portland, Oregon while receiving honorable mentions in the Advocacy, Documentary, Educational, and Water categories. His short documentary, Shalom House, was an official selection at the 2008 Non Violence Film Festival in Cambridge, Canada.
Steger is a professor at George Mason University where he teaches classes in fiction directing and documentary production, as well as the senior capstone courses in the Directing and Producing Concentration. He is the Concentration Head for the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies in Film and Video at Mason. Steger created and has taught Mason’s Potomac Academy’s Film and Video Summer Camp for adolescents since the summer of 2012. He is currently developing a new feature documentary as well as a short fiction film. He holds a MFA in Film and Video Production from Columbia College Chicago and a BA in Theater and Film from the University of Kansas.