Benny Jennings
COMPOSER

Benny Jennings is a Te Whanganui-a-Tara / Wellington based sound designer, composer and field recordist working across film, theatre, dance and VR. Benny is a graduate of Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music Sonic Art program, and holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Music (Sound Design).

Benny was Co-creator and Composer for the circus/performance art show Loops, where he performed the soundtrack live on a collection of tape machines and synthesisers. Loops earned the Grand Design award and the Melbourne Fringe Tour Ready award at the NZ Fringe Festival 2022, as well as earning him a nomination for Sound Designer of The Year in the 2022 Wellington Theatre Awards.

Benny has worked on a wide variety of Wellington theatre shows as a sound designer and sound technician. His first foray into the world of dance was collaborating with choreographer Jeremy Beck on the 2021 ChorecCo season A Floor, Some Thoughts and Us. He also worked as part of the technical sound teams for John Psathas’s Cuba Sonic (2021) - a 500 musician, 60 speaker street length performance and Movement of the Human's 2018 season of Rushes.

He has primarily worked in film post-production sound for the past few years, most notably as Assistant Sound Designer in the Oscar nominated post-production sound team for Avatar: The Way Of Water. Benny was also the Sound Designer on award winning VR film Minimum Mass directed by Raqi Syed & Arieto Echevarria.

Benny's approach to composition is often focused on utilising and repurposing the obsolete and the dead: found cassettes, reel-to-reel tape machines, modified walkmen, disintegrating tape loops and broken equipment. His music often reflects the tools used to create it, feeling discovered, dusty, broken and alienated.