Michelle Memran
Michelle Memran is a documentary filmmaker, journalist, and visual artist working in dementia awareness and creative aging advocacy. She spent two decades working as a reporter and researcher for various magazines, including Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine. Her award-winning debut documentary, The Rest I Make Up, chronicled a decade-long creative collaboration and friendship with visionary dramatist María Irene Fornés after the playwright stopped writing due to Alzheimer’s. The duo discovered a camera could continue Fornés's prolific creative process in profound and astonishing ways. Their film screened worldwide, from its 2018 MoMA premiere in NYC to the most recent installment of Documenta in Kassel, Germany. More crucially, it began a new artistic practice: many of Memran’s creative collaborators are advocates living with various forms of neurocognitive change. Together they’re crafting vital new narratives about this too often stigmatized and misunderstood cluster of conditions.