Max Bernstein was born in Buffalo, NY where he received his BA in Media Study with a concentration in film and video production, from the University at Buffalo. Bernstein also received an MFA in film production and studio art from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has worked and toured as a technical artist with the Wooster Group, and as a video and sound designer with Michelle Ellsworth, Kaki King, Cindy Kleine, Aynsley Vandenbroucke, Morgan Gould, and Ondine Geary. In addition, he is one half of the piano harp duo Outlier, a founding member of media art performance group the Flinching Eye Collective, a video artist for Friends Of The Tank, drummer and video designer for the band Eupana, composer and sound engineer at Tribal Studio, a lifelong multi-instrumentalist, and a Scuba Diver.

Bernstein’s personal works explore intersections of performance and media technologies through expanded hybrids of cinema, theater, music, and dance. His research covers cetacean ontologies, mediated representation of bodies, queer futurities in performance, decolonization, spectacle, and the absurd. Bernstein has taught film history and production at the University of Colorado Boulder, and video art at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. He is currently a lecturer for the department of Film, Dance, and Theater in the Arizona State University Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.