Michelle Citron is an award-winning film and digital artist whose work includes the films Daughter Rite, Parthenogenesis, What You Take For Granted…, Leftovers, and Lives:Visible and the interactive narratives Cocktails & Appetizers, Mixed Greens, and As American As Apple Pie. Her media art explores the lives of women – mothers and daughters, women in the workplace, the trauma of incest, lesbian culture – as well as ethnic identity. These works blend experimental styles with melodrama and an exploration of the border between documentary and fiction. An additional theme that flows through all Citron’s work is an examination of the autobiographical impulse, particularly as it is expressed through home movies, snapshots, and memoir.
Citron’s work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art/Chicago, as well as the New Directors, Berlinale, London, Edinburgh, Oberhausen, and NYMIX film festivals. Her films and interactive narratives are in the permanent collections of over two hundred fifty universities and museums.
Her book, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions (University of Minnesota Press), won three awards, including a Special Commendation from the Krasza-Krausa International Book Award, which cited the book for being “an extraordinary blend of autobiographical and film writing which offers a radical new way of thinking and writing about film.”
She received two National Endowment for the Arts Filmmaking Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Humanities Media Grant, and three Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowships – for filmmaking, screenwriting, and digital arts.
Citron’s films are archived in the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Academy Film Archive; her interactive art is archived in the Rose Goldsen Archive, Cornell University; and her papers are archived in the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin/Madison.
She has an Interdisciplinary PhD in Cognitive Studies from the University of Wisconsin/Madison.