Directory Profile

Michael Renov, the Haskell Wexler Endowed Chair in Documentary, is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts and SCA’s Vice Dean for Academic Affairs. He is the author of Hollywood’s Wartime Woman: Representation and Ideology (1988) and The Subject of Documentary (2004) and has edited or co-edited six other books including Theorizing Documentary (1993), Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (1996), Collecting Visible Evidence (1999), The Sage Handbook of Film Studies (2008) and Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Peter Forgacs (2011). Renov co-founded Visible Evidence, an international documentary studies conference that has been held annually on five continents since 1993. He is one of four editors of the Investigating Visible Evidence book series at Columbia University Press.

Renov is a Co-Principal Investigator of the American Film Showcase, the U.S. State Department’s flagship international film and TV public diplomacy program since 2012. He has served on many documentary film festival juries including Sundance, the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, It’s All True (Brazil), DocLisboa International Film Festival and the EBS International Documentary Festival (South Korea). He has taught graduate seminars on documentary at the University of Stockholm, Tel Aviv University and Central European University in Budapest and has led documentary workshops in Jordan for the Royal Film Commission and in Cyprus. Renov's teaching and research interests include documentary theory, autobiography in film and video, and representations of the Holocaust.

• Head of Visible Evidence, an international series of conferences on documentary studies.

Hollywood’s Wartime Woman: Representation and Ideology (UMI Research Press, 1988)

Theorizing Documentary (editor, Routledge/American Film Institute, 1993)

Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (co-editor, University of Minnesota Press, 1995)

Collecting Visible Evidence (co-editor, University of Minnesota Press, 1999)

The Subject of Documentary (University of Minnesota Press, 2004)

Handbook on Film Studies (co-editor, Sage Publications, 2008)

Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Peter Forgacs (co-editor, University of Minnesota Press, 2011)