Born in Manchester, England, in 1964, Sarah Michelson has lived and worked in New York since 1991, where she has become a fixture of the downtown dance community. Her works are known for their athleticism, rigor, beauty and attention to architectural space. Her choreography, she has written, "risks rejection" and "denies safety"; deliberately difficult, it inspires both adoration and debate. This book--featuring original essays, an interview with Michelson and a cultural history of her oeuvre written by her peers--explores the concepts and content of the choreographer's work, bringing it vividly to life.

Italian sermons tell a story of the Reformation that credits preachers with using the pulpit, pen, and printing press to keep Italy Catholic when the region’s violent religious wars made the future uncertain, and with fashioning a post-Reformation Catholicism that would survive the competition and religious choice of their own time and ours.

On Value is a collaboration between Triple Canopy and choreographer/artist Ralph Lemon. The book is a multifarious conversation about the value of artworks and the labor and bodies that make them, especially as defined by institutions with whom artists have often had fraught relationships. In essays, poems, interviews and artworks, 19 contributors consider artworks that resist institutional parameters; how and why performers, choreographers and dancers might go about making art institutions into proper venues for their works; and how race figures into assessments of value. On Value emerges from Value Talks, a series of private conversations organized by Lemon in 2013 and 2014 at MoMA.

Annette Michelson's erudite and incisive readings of the revolutionary films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, collected for the first time. This posthumous volume gathers Annette Michelson's erudite and incisive readings of the revolutionary films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, giving readers the opportunity to track her sustained investigations into their work. Michelson introduced American audiences to Soviet cinema in the early 1970s, extending the interpretive paradigm she had used for American filmmakers of the mid-twentieth century—in which she emphasized phenomenological readings of their work—to films and writings by Eisenstein and Vertov. Over four decades, Michelson returned again and again to what she calls, following Eisenstein, “intellectual cinema”—the deliberate attempt to create philosophically informed analogues for consciousness. The volume includes Michelson's major essays on Eisenstein's unrealized attempts to make movies of both Marx's Capital and Joyce's Ulysses, as well as her authoritative discussion of Vertov's 1929 masterpiece The Man with a Movie Camera. Together, the texts demonstrate Michelson's pervasive influence as a writer and thinker, and her role in the establishment of cinema studies as an academic field. This collection makes these canonical texts available for a new generation of film scholars.

Exhibition catalogue for The First Water Is the Body, on view at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey October 9, 2021 - January 23, 2022.

Annette Michelson's contributions to art and film criticism over the last three decades have been unparalleled. This volume honors her unique legacy with original essays by some of the many scholars who have been influenced by her work. Some continue her efforts to develop theoretical frameworks for understanding modernist art, while others practice her form of interdisciplinary criticism in relation to avant-garde and modernist art works and artists. Still others investigate and evaluate Michelson's work itself. All in some way pay homage to her extraordinary contribution.

There is a category of choreographic practice with a lineage stretching back to mid-20th century North America that has re-emerged since the early 1990s: dance as a contemporary art medium. Such work belongs as much to the gallery as does video art or sculpture and is distinct from both performance art and its history as well as from theater-based dance. The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art clarifies the continuities and differences between the second-wave dance avant-garde in the 1950s‒1970s and the third-wave starting in the 1990s. Through close readings of key artists such as Maria Hassabi, Sarah Michelson, Boris Charmatz, Meg Stuart, Philipp Gehmacher, Adam Linder, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Shelley Lasica and Latai Taumoepeau, The Persistence of Dance traces the relationship between the third-wave and gallery-based work. Looking at these artists highlights how the discussions and practices associated with “conceptual dance” resonate with the categories of conceptual and post-conceptual art as well as with the critical work on the function of visual art categories. Brannigan concludes that within the current post-disciplinary context, there is a persistence of dance and that a model of post-dance exists that encompasses dance as a contemporary art medium.