Introduction
Michelle Citron (born in Boston, Massachusetts) is a film, video and multimedia artist, scholar and author.
Early life
Michelle Citron was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Citron attended University of Massachusetts and earned a B.S. in Psychology. She has an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in cognitive studies and aesthetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Citron was a Professor of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University from 1978 to 2006, where she also served as Associate Dean of The Graduate School and Chair of the Department of Radio/Television/FIlm. She was Chair of the Interdisciplinary Arts Department, Columbia College Chicago from 2006-2012.
Career
Citron's films explore the lives of women – mothers and daughters, women in the workplace, the trauma of incest, lesbian culture – as well as ethnic identity. These works, influenced by avant-garde film and feminism, blend experimental styles with melodrama and an exploration of the border between documentary and fiction. This experimentation continues with a series of more recent interactive narratives as well as her writing, particularly her book, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions. 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 been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art/Chicago, and the American Film Institute/Kennedy Center, as well as the New Directors, Berlin, London, Edinburgh, Oberhausen, and SeNef film and New Media festivals, among others. Her films and interactive narratives are distributed worldwide and are part of the permanent collections of over two hundred universities and museums. She has received many awards and fellowships including two National Endowment for the Arts Filmmaking Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Humanities Media Grant, and three Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowships - for digital arts, filmmaking, and screenwriting. Citron has lectured extensively with her work at universities, museums and cultural centers worldwide including: The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, The Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University, The University of Graz, Austria, The Film Archive of the People’s Republic of China, The University of Hong Kong, University of Southern California, and The Walker Art Center.
Filmography (partial list)
| Year | Title | Length | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1973 | Self-Defense | 4 minutes | Experimental Film |
| 1973 | Integration | 8 minutes | Experimental Film |
| 1975 | Parthenogenesis | 25 minutes | Experimental documentary about two women violinists: a student and her teacher. |
| 1978 | Daughter Rite | 55 minutes | A feminist pseudo-documentary about mothers and daughters, it has been called " a classic, the missing link between the 'Direct Cinema' documentaries and the later hybrids that acknowledged truth couldn't always be found in front of a camera lens." |
| 1983 | What You Take for Granted… | 75 minutes | A fiction/documentary hybrid about women who work in traditionally male jobs, both working class and professional. |
| 1983 | Mother Rite | 25 minutes | A documentary video about Citron’s mother who worked for many years at Hamburger Mary’s, a famous gay bar and restaurant in Honolulu. |
| 2014 | Leftovers | 25 minutes | An experimental documentary about two women who lived together in Chicago for almost fifty years. Leftovers explores the hidden trajectory of lives lived at the margins through the snapshots left behind.Leftovers is the fourth, and final, course in Queer Feast. See Multimedia. |
| 2017 | Lives:Visible | 35 minutes | An essay/documentary. 2000 snapshots taken over four decades by a close group of lesbian friends reveal the rich history of butch/fem working class life in pre-Stonewall Chicago. |
Multimedia
Since 1999, Citron has explored new ways to experience story with a series interactive narratives that collectively comprise Queerfeast.com. Each piece in the series is a distinct work; collectively they create a multi-course meal of lesbian life played out through its pleasures, complications, and contradictions.
| Year | Title | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1999 | As American As Apple Pie | What happens after the first kiss is over? A typical American love story about food, family, work, compromises, and adultery. Twenty-two scenes randomly accessed reveal a different trajectory of Cilla’s and Lucille’s relationship each time the piece is player. Along the way you learn how to make an apple pie. |
| 2001 | Cocktails & Appetizers | A vibrant and sexy homage to lesbian pulp fiction of the 1950s. We eavesdrop at a cocktail party and from the swirling snippets of gossip construct a story of Max and Jesse falling into lust and love. |
| 2002 | Jewish Looks | A meditation on four family photos and the myths, history, and desires that surround them. |
| 2004 | Mixed Greens | A do-it-yourself movie about identity, belonging, and the things we desire. A salad of forty-eight scenes tosses together two stories: four generations of Citron’s Irish Jewish heritage played against four decades of lesbian life in America, challenging our ideas of the rewards and price of assimilation. |
| 2014 | Leftovers | The only linear work in the series, is the final course. |