Michele O'Marah

Michele O'Marah (born 1967) is an American video artist. Her works have been named among the best of 2002 and the best of 2010 by Artforum.

O'Marah was born 1967 in Vallejo, California. She earned a B.F.A. from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, majoring in photography.

O'Marah often remakes and reinterprets films, interviews, and other media. In the 2001 White Diamonds, Agent Orange, she recreated a 1970 60 Minutes interview with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and paired the remade interview with a fictionalization of the Vietnam War. Discussing the project in a later interview, she stated, "y idea was to fail the original Valley Girl. One person cannot replicate the job of an 80-person film crew. So I thought that my Valley Girl would be a process piece where the video would at times be a dismal failure...because I could never perfectly re-create the original." In the melodramatic video, non-actors "deliver an amusingly fraught dialogue reflecting on the hubris of the haute bourgeoisie."

Her 2010 project A Girls' Gotta Do What a Girl's Gotta Do remade three scenes from the 1996 Pamela Anderson film Barb Wire.

Selected works 1997 - For Those About To Rock 2001 - White Diamonds/Agent Orange 2002 - Valley Girl 2004 - Peacehead 2006 - Faustus's Children, a single-channel video created with David Jones and Tim Jackson 2007 - How Goes it with the Black Movement? 2010 - A Girls' Gotta Do What a Girl's Gotta Do 2012 - Blow Me!