Ben has served as assistant archivist and consultant for WNYC and has helmed the archives' Leon Levy digitization project since January, 2021.
Ben was born in Madison, Wisconsin, but was nurtured in the art of sound. As a young man he followed the call of music to Austin, spending years as a touring and recording musician before "retiring" to attend the University of Texas. He graduated with highest honors with a baccalaureate in sociology in 2008, only to again heed his muse’s call, breaking his retirement almost immediately to return to the music scene he loves.
That love matured, as all true loves do, gradually manifesting itself as a desire to fulfill his spiritual debt to the history of recorded sound, and in 2013 Ben enrolled in UT’s School of Information, where he would focus on archives, copyright, and audiovisual preservation. During his time at the iSchool, Ben worked for the Historical Music Recordings Collection at UT's Fine Arts Library, one of the largest audio archives in the United States. He graduated from the iSchool with a Masters of Science in Information Studies in 2015.
Ben joined New York Public Radio in 2015 to work on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, appraising, reformatting, cataloging, and writing articles about archival audio from the New York City Municipal Archives’ WNYC collection. Beguiled by Terpsichore's turn to dance, Ben left to join the archives of the Trisha Brown Dance Company and Merce Cunningham Trust in 2016—partnering with Trisha on her turn to zeros and ones and seeing Merce's archives through a Centennial (and a pandemic)—before returning to WNYC in 2020 to lead their large-scale Leon Levy digitization program. He has also worked at the Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS) at Rutgers University where he guided the conservation of the Count Basie family papers and artifacts. At IJS, he has held in his hand a mixtape and hand-written letter from Louis Armstrong to Catherine Basie.
He lives in Brooklyn with his amazing wife Julie and their two cats. This is his Survival Kit:
- Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths
- Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch
- Walter Gieseking - Preludes (Debussy), or Fats Waller's 1937 solo piano performance of "I Ain't Got Nobody"
- Trisha Brown - Set and Reset
- Dorothea Tanning - "Some Roses and their Phantoms"
- Italo Calvino - If on a winter's night a traveler... or T Zero
- A melodica (or a Casio SK-1)
- A stack of New York Times acrostic puzzles
- And one of these: The National - Alligator, Guided by Voices - Alien Lanes, Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, or Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet, he can't decide which.
Ben Houtman appears in the following:
The Story Behind the V.D. Radio Project
Saturday, February 16, 2019
Robert Moses' Ten Commandments
Thursday, July 28, 2016
Robert Moses, The Power Broker, and The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes
Thursday, June 09, 2016
W. H. Auden, an Appreciation
Thursday, April 21, 2016
e. e. cummings
Thursday, April 14, 2016
Robert Moses, Master Builder, Rap Genius
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
The Mystery of P. Campbell
Thursday, March 24, 2016
Police Corruption and the Civilian Review Board
Thursday, March 03, 2016
Mayor v. MacDougal Street
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Shock Treatment
Tuesday, February 09, 2016
Mayor John Vliet Lindsay, Comedian - Live at the Inner Circle
Wednesday, February 03, 2016
Music Decriminalized: The End of "Cabaret Cards"
Thursday, January 28, 2016
Critics, Authors, and Trivial Pursuits - a 1953 WNYC Book Fest Quiz
Tuesday, January 12, 2016

La Guardia Backs Labor Leader Dorothy Bellanca
Tuesday, November 03, 2015
