Michelle Puetz is a curator, historian, archivist, and educator focused on the intersections of cinema, contemporary art, sound, performance, and technology. Her research interests include global avant-garde, experimental, and independent cinema; artists’ film and video; expanded cinema; sound art; film projection and technologies of image and sound reproduction; and theories of media and performance, sexuality and gender.

She is an Exhibitions Curator at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures where she is working to develop exhibitions and programs that contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema.

From 2015-17, Puetz was the Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. She was part of the collaborative curatorial team for A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s, co-curated Salaam Cinema! 50 Years of Iranian Movie Posters with Hamid Naficy, and curated over 120 public programs and artist visits for Block Cinema.

Puetz was the 2013-15 Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where she curated a group exhibition titled Body Doubles and solo exhibitions with artists Lilli Carré and Phil Collins. She developed and managed the MCA Exhibition History Project and oversaw the conservation of over 280 video tapes in the museum’s archive. She was the lead researcher for Goshka Macuga’s artist residency and the resulting exhibition, Preparatory Notes for a Chicago Comedy, which was presented at the Berlin Biennale in 2014.

Puetz taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the departments of Art History, Theory & Criticism and Film, Video, New Media & Animation from 2008-15, and in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2010 to 2012.

Her dissertation, Variable Area: Hearing and Seeing Sound in Structural Cinema, 1966-1978, explored sound reproduction technologies and the relationship between avant-garde cinema, sound, performance, and minimalism. She received her PhD from the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.