Annette Michelson

Annette Michelson (née Michelsohn; November 7, 1922 – September 17, 2018) was an American art and film critic and academic. A longtime contributor and editor to Artforum who later co-founded the journal October, she also taught for many years at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Her work contributed to the fields of cinema studies and the avant-garde in visual culture.

Background Annette Michelsohn was born to a Jewish family in Manhattan on November 7, 1922. Her father, of Romanian descent, spoke Yiddish, and her mother, of Hungarian descent, spoke German. Her surname was anglicized to Michelson. Krauss and Michelson remained on the journal's editorial board, along with Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Denis Hollier, David Joselit, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Mignon Nixon, and Malcolm Turvey.

In 1998, Michelson gave a historic lecture on Harry Everett Smith's film Heaven + Earth Magic (Film #12) at Massachusetts College of Art. In 2021 a recording of the presentation was discovered in the archives of Saul Levine and later digitized by Raymond Foye who made it publicly available on his YouTube channel.

Among her numerous translations, essays and articles, Michelson edited Kino-Eye: the Writings of Dziga Vertov (1984), and Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima (1992).

On August 10, 2015, the Getty Research Institute announced that Michelson had donated her complete papers and archives to the Institute. The volume includes the first critical essay on Marcel Duchamp's film Anemic Cinema, the first investigation into Joseph Cornell's filmic practices, and the first major exploration of work by Michael Snow. It also includes important essays on Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Hollis Frampton.

Personal life and death Michelson, who lived in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, died from dementia at her home on September 17, 2018, at the age of 95.