After Mike completed his BFA in visual art and art history at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts in New Jersey, he went to Hohokus School of Technical Trades where he learned structural plate steel welding. Mike then worked at the Sculpture Foundation’s Johnson Atelier first as a sculpture technician and then as departmental supervisor of fabrication. Moving to Baltimore, Benevenia attended the Rinehart School of Sculpture at Maryland Institute College of Art, completing his MFA thesis informed by research on American Civil War medicine and prosthetics. Mike then moved to Lancaster PA to manage Millersville University’s art studios and teach. Upon receiving a Fulbright-Nehru research fellowship in 2019, Mike left Lancaster to study Unani medicine in India. While in India, Mike studied at Jamia Hamdard University in Delhi, and the Ibn Sina Academy of Medieval Medicine and Science in Aligarh. Due to the Covid19 pandemic, Mike was obliged to leave India and to return to the States in early 2020, settling in Philadelphia and continuing to exhibit and make work.

Mike has shown his work across the East coast in solo and group exhibitions. In addition to being a Fulbright scholar, Benevenia has been awarded a 2017 residency at Sculpture Space in Utica NY, presented at the 2017 National Museum of Civil War Medicine's annual conference, and has been a Janet & Walter Sondheim ARTSCAPE Prize Semi-Finalist in both 2016 and 2018. In 2018 Benevenia began a long-term collaboration as the first artist-in-residence at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland. The first of three solo exhibitions with the Museum, "Redressing the Wound" ran from 2018- 2019. The second exhibition is upcoming at the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum, Washington D.C., followed by the Pry House Field Hospital on Antietam National Battlefield, Keedysville, Maryland.