Michelle Memran
Filmmaker | Journalist | Dementia Advocate
Michelle Memran is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, journalist, and dementia advocate whose work weaves collaborative storytelling with social justice. As a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health, she co-creates artful, impactful media with individuals navigating neurocognitive change, centering firsthand perspectives to disrupt societal stigma.
Co-Created Advocacy Videos
Let This Be a Symphony is a media advocacy campaign using collaborative video storytelling to de-stigmatize Alzheimer’s and related dementias. By centering lived experience narratives, we aim to change the conversation (and the culture).
Neurologist David Brodie-Mends on Healthcare in Ghana, Community, and the Hospital He Calls Home
Media Advocacy for Nonprofits: National Council of Dementia Minds
The National Council of Dementia Minds (NCDM) is a nonprofit organization founded and led by people living with dementia to challenge stigma and change the perception of the disease. It offers peer support, educational experiences, and practical tools to foster connection and purpose for individuals with dementia and their care partners.
Here are two of videos I’ve co-created with NCDM members.
Living Well with Dementia
Transforming Life With Dementia
The Rest I Make Up chronicles a decade-long creative collaboration with visionary playwright María Irene Fornés during the years she lived with Alzheimer’s disease. Together, Memran and Fornés discovered that a camera could pick up where the pen left off. Their film premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, was named one of “The Best Films of 2018” by Richard Brody in The New Yorker, and continues to screen worldwide.
“A lyrical and lovingly made documentary.”
Documentary: The Rest I Make Up
“Above all, the movie embodies Fornés’s inherently and irrepressibly creative presence. The text alone, transcribed, would be a primer in live-wire poetic lucidity.”
Selected Press
Awards & Supporters
Frameline Film Festival
Audience Award for Best Documentary
Reeling: Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival
AARP Silver Image Award, Jury Award for Best Doc Feature
OUTshine Film Festival
Jury Award and Runner-Up Audience Award for Best Documentary
Queer Porto 4 - International Queer Film Festival
Special Mention
Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival
Best Documentary Feature
Some Prefer Cake Film Festival
Audience Award and Jury Award for Best Documentary
2025 UCSF Library Artist in Residence
Past Advocacy, Future Change: HIV/AIDS Campaigns Transforming Dementia Narratives is a multimedia project that explores how the visual language and community-led messaging of early HIV/AIDS activism can inspire more humanizing, solutions-based narratives around Alzheimer’s and related dementias today. Drawing from the UCSF Library’s extensive HIV/AIDS Epidemic Collection — including posters, public service announcements, and oral histories — artist-in-residence Michelle Memran will create new works that challenge stigma and amplify the experiences of individuals living with dementia.
Writing + Press
Selected Press
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, “Towards Aspirational Care Labor: Dementia Care Meets Documentary Filmmaking,” Autumn 2023
Caring for the Ages, “Therapeutic Filmmaking, Artistic Collaboration, and Dementia: Exploring Possibilities with Filmmaker Michelle Memran,” 2023
In Her Lens, “In Conversation: Archives & Documentary w/ Michelle Memran,” 2022
Orange County Register, “How can you live well after being diagnosed with dementia?,”2022
The Washington Post, “Perspective: How fiction and poetry can help you navigate a loved one’s dementia,” 2022
Rialta, “Cartas desde Cuba a Michelle Memran: ‘The Rest I Make Up,” 2020
BOMB, "In a Dark Time the Eye Begins to See: Michelle Memran Interviewed by Alix Lambert,” 2018
Artforum, “And What of the Night? Helen Shaw on Maria Irene Fornes,” 2018
The New York Times, “An Avant-Garde Theater Artist Gets Her Due,” 2018
The New Yorker, “An Extraordinary Documentary Portrait of a Playwright facing Alzheimer’s Disease,” 2018
The New York Times, “Review: In ‘The Rest I Make Up,’ a Playwright’s Life as Memories Ebb,” 2018
NBC News, “One of our best American playwrights, María Irene Fornés is featured in new documentary,” 2018
Howlround, “Creativity, Aging, and Alzheimer’s: A Conversation with Michelle Memran,” 2016
The Brooklyn Rail, “The Rest I Make Up: Michelle Memran with Katie Pearl,” 2016
Selected Writing
Cambridge University Press, Fornés in Context, Contributor, 2025
Simon & Schuster, Our Red Book, Contributor, 2022
The Boston Globe, “A red badge of courage, period,” 2022
Talkhouse, “Start With One Face: How Uncertainty in Art Quells Uncertainty in Life,” 2021
Talkhouse, “How I Survived Cancer and Finishing a 15-year Documentary,” 2019
Harper’s Magazine, “Candid Camera,” 2016
Vanity Fair, “Tony Kushner Gives Rave Review of Production of Angels in America,” 2014
Vanity Fair, “The Designers Behind New York City’s Iconic Subway-System Signage,” 2013
The Brooklyn Rail, "Accordions in the Arctic: Cynthia Hopkins Sails Ahead,” 2012
Vanity Fair, “Ric Burns on Eugene O’Neill’s Long Journey,” 2006
The Brooklyn Rail, “Europe: Here is Not Everywhere,” April 2003
The Brooklyn Rail, “Moment to Moment with Maria Irene Fornes,” 2002
The New York Times, “Theatre: Annals of Asia in America, in Small Bites,” 2001
American Theatre, "Measure for Measure: Playwrights Respond to Critics,” 2001
Newsweek, “Death Row Dramatized,” 2000; “Broadway-Trained, Hollywood-Bound,” 2000; Periscope weekly column
Biography + C.V.
Michelle Memran is a documentary filmmaker, journalist, and dementia advocate whose work weaves collaborative storytelling with social change. As a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health, she co-creates artful, impactful media with individuals navigating mild cognitive impairment and dementia-related conditions, centering firsthand perspectives to disrupt societal stigma.
Her award-winning debut film, The Rest I Make Up, chronicles a decade-long creative collaboration and friendship with visionary playwright María Irene Fornés while she was living with Alzheimer’s. Together, they discovered that a camera could ignite a vital new artistic practice. The film premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and was named one of “The Best Films of 2018” by The New Yorker.
Michelle is currently the UCSF Library Artist in Residence, creating "Past Advocacy, Future Change: HIV/AIDS Campaigns Transforming Dementia Narratives," and developing Let This Be a Symphony, a new dementia media advocacy campaign (recently awarded pilot funding from the Alzheimer’s Association, Alzheimer’s Society UK, and the Global Brain Health Institute).
Previously, she spent two decades as a reporter and researcher for various magazines, including Newsweek, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times Magazine.
