Interests
Michelle Memran
Filmmaker, Artist, Advocate
By amplifying the voices of individuals living with dementia, we can disrupt societal stigma, transform media, improve health outcomes, and save relationships.
Current Work
Michelle is a documentary filmmaker working in dementia awareness and creative aging advocacy. Her collaborators are living with various forms of dementia. Together, we're co-creating new narratives about what it means to live fully – for each of them.
Personal Hero
Persons Living with Dementia
Words of Strength
Creative Collaboration as Care
Vision
By amplifying the voices of individuals living with dementia through purposeful and artful creative collaborations, Michelle believes we can disrupt societal stigma, transform media, improve health outcomes, and save relationships.
Strategy
As a documentary filmmaker, Michelle uses a camera as a tool for creative expression and collaboration with individuals navigating neurocognitive change. Together, they co-create vital short films that articulate a rich range of lived experience.
Impact
As an Atlantic Fellow, Michelle aims to shift dementia's pervasive "tragedy narrative" by elevating media content and approaches to creative care. Exploring participatory filmmaking as a care modality, she hopes to change the lens from loss to love.
Motivation
The prevailing dementia narrative in the United States is one of despair and loss, mainly expressed by care partners and healthcare providers. The perspectives of those living with dementia are essential in creating viable and equitable ways forward.
Education & Experience
Michelle Memran received her B.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School. She spent 20 years as a reporter and researcher for various magazines, including Newsweek, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times Magazine.
Her award-winning documentary film, "The Rest I Make Up," chronicles a decade-long creative partnership and friendship with visionary playwright María Irene Fornés, who had stopped writing due to Alzheimer's. They discovered that a camera could continue Fornés's prolific creative process and forge a new way forward for them both.
Their film premiered at MoMA in 2018 and screened worldwide. More crucially, it sparked a new artistic practice: Michelle's creative partners are advocates living with various forms of dementia. Together, they're co-creating vital new narratives about this too often stigmatized and misunderstood cluster of conditions.
Awards & Honors
Encore Community Services
Aging Through the Arts
Frameline Film Festival
Documentary/Film
MIX Copenhagen
Documentary/Film
Reeling: Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival
Film/Aging/LGBTQIA+
OUTshine Film Festival
Documentary/Film
Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival
Documentary/Film
MacDowell
Film + Media
Send
Michelle
a NoteHave ideas for global brain health or a collaboration? I would love to hear from you. Feel free to send an introductory note.
