Ben Golden

About

The twelve-year arc

Marketing departments, an awards show, sponsored sports television. Lately, building what nobody was selling.

Where I came from

Marketing departments, agencies, branded content in sports

I came up making video inside marketing departments, first in New York, then Los Angeles, then New York again. Event recaps, fundraising films, product work, short-form social. Twelve years of After Effects, Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve underneath all of it. I picked up the Libera Awards in 2021, the independent music industry's annual awards show, and I've built its animation package and run its video production every year since. MSG Networks followed a year later: quick-turn pretapes for Knicks and Rangers sponsors such as BMW, Caesars, and Coinbase. The job was fitting a brand into something nobody tuned in to see an ad for.

Ben Golden shouldering a camera rig in an empty Madison Square Garden, every seat draped with a blue New York playoff shirt
Madison Square Garden, 2023Knicks playoffs, before doors.

The work I already did got faster, and work I could never have taken on became possible.

What changed

ComfyUI, 2024

I started building with ComfyUI in 2024. Automating tedious parts of production was the smallest of it. Two things happened at once. The work I already did got faster, and work I could never have taken on became possible. Programming and AI tooling are self-taught and recent, and I learned them by shipping: a spec pipeline for a job interview, then a tool suite the agency now sells, then a system of agents that made an entire awards show's animation package.

A generated self-portrait: the head rebuilt as a sculpture of metal pins, the glasses cast into it
Self-Portrait, 2025Made with SDXL in ComfyUI.

Where I am

Direct Agents

Currently I'm Senior Video Editor & Creative Technologist at Direct Agents, a full-service performance marketing agency in New York City. I serve as the AI implementation lead for the creative team and sit on the agency's cross-functional AI working group. I recently completed my Anthropic Partner certification.

The record

Where I've worked

Most recent first.

  1. Direct Agents 2025 to present, freelance in 2024
  2. Agital 2023, and 2024 to 2025
  3. MSG Networks 2022 to 2024
  4. Libera Awards 2021 to present

BA, Digital Media Production, with a minor in Creative Writing. SUNY New Paltz.