Scott Benefield is an artist, educator and writer who received his MFA from Ohio State University in 1990. He is a past president of the Glass Art Society (US) and currently serves on its Advisory Committee. He has been a Fellow at the Creative Glass Center of America and an artist-in-residence at the Toledo Museum of Art, the National College of Art & Design (Ireland), North Lands Creative Glass (UK), Vrij Glas (Netherlands), Pittsburgh Glass Center, the Corning Museum of Glass and the Tacoma Museum of Glass (US). He has taught workshops in Italian cane techniques at the Penland School of Crafts, the Pilchuck Glass School, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, the National College of Art and Design (Ireland), the Glass Furnace (Turkey) and was a visiting scholar at Osaka University of the Arts in 2009. His writing about studio glass has been published in numerous publications, including Glass Quarterly and the Glass Art Society Journal. In 2011 he was given the Lifetime Membership Award from the Glass Art Society and in 2013 he was a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust (QEST) recipient. In 2015 he was given the second annual Rosemary James Memorial Award by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He currently lives and works in Northern Ireland.
