Benjamin Moreno

As the Assistant Manager Archival Media Services I oversee all Audio and Moving Image on the Performing Arts Libraries 3rd floor research area. I manage a small group of Techs who maintains and services the libraries Playback suite. I also assist with rentals and public programming. 

Ben Moreno works at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts as the Assistant Manager Archival Media Services . In addition to his work at the library, he is one half of the 2 Hungry Bros, a hip hop production duo, who have provided beats for numerous rappers, including but not limited to Homeboy Sandman, Fresh Daily, Doc Reeves, C-Ray Walz, Reef the Lost Cause, Substantial, and P.so.

He is also an accomplished DJ, playing at numerous clubs, including the Nuyorican Poets Café, which was founded by Miguel Algarin.

Ben has also produced two acclaimed instrumental albums, I Moreno and Love Handles, and provided tracks for the 2015 film short Kung Fu Bum.

 I want to stress that Ben’s resume does not aptly capture the richness of his work. Born and raised in the Lower East Side of New York City, Ben had a front seat to many of the innovations generated within Black and Afrolatinx communities in the 1980s and 90s.  From murals on handball courts, to community parties, to the sounds of salsa, merengue, rap and house, Ben’s neighborhood served as a meeting ground for different community expressions. And it is this sense of difference and commonality, of individual expressivity and communal belonging that Ben’s music most beautifully expresses. Whether he is sampling the Puerto Rican vocalist Sophy, or the African American sweet soul group, the Dramatics, Ben’s work makes clear that rap’s enduring links to both Black cultural production and Diasporic practices is its ability to locate what the Caribbean poet and theorist Audre Lorde called the “interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences.”

Indeed, to listen to Ben's work is to encounter a practice of thinking with both sound and language that when done as lovingly and exquisitely as he does, cannot help but bring us into a space where difference and communion are not antonymic but, in fact, two modes of encounter that occur simultaneously, if only we open ourselves to their often difficult possibility.

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