Ben Lewis is an author, art historian, and documentary-film-maker. His last book The Last Leonardo, about the world’s most expensive painting, the $450m Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, was published last year by Harper Collins in the UK and Penguin Random House in America.

His book, written while he was a Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London, occupied the entire front page of The Times on the day of its release, and he was also invited to speak on the opening weekend of the Hay Literary Festival. The Guardian praised its “formidably researched detail” and the Sunday Times admired his “gripping investigation”.

His feature documentaries include several investigating the contemporary art market ‘The Great Contemporary Art Bubble (BBC, Arte, SVT etc., 2009) and ‘A Banker’s Guide to Art’ (BBC 2016), as well as the television series about contemporary artists ‘Art Safari (2003-7); also a film about Google’s book scanning project 'Google and the World Brain’ (2012, premiered at Sundance) and another about the Beatles’ Apple Corporation ’The Beatles, the Hippies and the Hells Angels’ (2017).