René Beekman is one of the founders of V-R Ltd, a Bulgarian company specializing in online services. Its first product launched was an online ordering service for large format photo-prints; printo.bg, aimed at the Bulgarian market and the first of its kind in this country.
Other products are under development.
During the day he currently works as online product development manager for the publisher of an English-language newspaper in Bulgaria.
René Beekman received his art education at the AKI art-academy in Enschede (the Netherlands). He later followed additional classes, courses, and workshops at, among others, IRCAM in Paris (France), at the State University of New York in Buffalo (U.S.), and at CNMAT at Berkeley University (U.S.).
He is a board member of the GMT+2 Foundation, he is - together with Bulgarian artist Krassimir Terziev - co-founder and co-director of the xfilm festival for experimental film, video and new media in Sofia (Bulgaria).
René Beekman is a member of the review board of and has written reviews for Leonardo Digital Review. And he has initiated and organized dorkbot-sofia, a series of meetings for "people doing strange things with electricity" with the support of Gallery Irida and Electricity Distribution Capital EAD.
Occasionally he teaches at the National Academy of Arts, Sofia (Bulgaria).
His artistic work has been shown on television in the Netherlands, Germany and Latvia, at video, media and film festivals, and in exhibitions (both solo and group exhibitions) in the Netherlands (World Wide Video Festival), the UK (Below 45, London; Sheffield Media Show,Sheffield; videopositive, Liverpool), Canada, France (Rencontres Video Art Plastique, Herouville St. Clair; VideoFormes Festival, Clermont-Ferrand), Germany (European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück; Videonale, Bonn), Austria, China, Finland, Switzerland (Viper International Film, Video and Multimedia Festival Lucerne, Lucerne), Japan, Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria (Project End, Sofia), Croatia (International Festival of New Film, Split), the United States (the Kitchen, New York), and the Ukraine among others.
Besides video and video-installations, his work includes audio-art, which has been broadcasted on radio in the Netherlands and the U.S. and has been released on CD (Audio Research Editions). It has been included in a public video-library in Nagoya (Japan); and is distributed by Netherlands Media Art Institute Montevideo/TimeBased Arts Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and The Kitchen, New York (U.S.A.)
In 1999 he was co-organiser of two symposia under the title "That Media Thing" in Amsterdam, co-organized with Netherlands Media Art Institute, MonteVideo/TBA, ASCA (the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis) and L&B (Lier & Boog, Series of Philosophy of Art and Art theory). He has published in 'Lier & Boog, Series of Philosophy of Art and Art Theory', Volume 15 "Screen-Based Art".
René Beekman has received numerous stipends from the Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (the Netherlands).
In 1995 he was an artist-in-residence at Harvestworks in New York (U.S.), and in 2005 at Experimental Television Center (U.S.) and ArtToday Foundation (Plovdiv, Bulgaria).
In 2001 he curated the international selection of the first video-art presentation at the Sofia Film Fest, screened at the Euro-Bulgarian Cultural Centre in Sofia (Bulgaria).
In 2003 and 2004 he collaborated on the theatre production "Razbivane" (Bash) written by Neil Labute and directed by Snejina Tankovska, at the National Theater "Ivan Vazov" in Sofia. Also in 2004 he designed and produced the interactive video for the theater production of "Gosposidin Ibrahim ili tzvetyata na korana" (Monsieur Ibrahim or the flowers of the Koran), written by Ernst Emanuel Schmit and directed by Snejina Tankovska at the National Theater "Ivan Vazov" in Sofia.
In 2003 and 2004 René Beekman was part of the team of the Bulgarian-Dutch project "The ABC project: Art, Bulgaria, Commerce - Towards better opportunities for Bulgarian visual artists".
