Grad Film MFA candidate Benji Santayana Zusman is the recipient of the 2025 Sloan Feature Film Prize of $150,000 for his film, Liar's Paradox.
Benji Santayana Zusman is a Cuban-Peruvian American who studied biochemistry at Harvard University and received his medical degree from the University of Florida. After research at MIT Lincoln Labs, he worked on documentary film in Panama on a Rockefeller Fellowship, and later became a TED Global Fellow and a Harvard Film Study Center Fellow. He worked as a production assistant for Julie and Roger Corman before enrolling in NYU Tisch Grad Film, where he’s a recipient of the Peter D. Gould Scholarship, and makes funny movies about unfunny things.
Based on history, The Liar's Paradox is a mathematical tragicomedy about a group of oddball idealists, dubbed the Vienna Circle, who set out to use math to separate truth from lies in 1930s fascist Vienna. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t go well—but they create our modern scientific worldview.