The multidisciplinary artist and experimental filmmaker will present her moving-image work at MoMA as part of Long Live the Underground! Celebrating Six Decades of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Millennium Film Workshop.
NEW YORK, August 2026 — Artist, filmmaker, writer, and curator Michèle Saint-Michel will screen her experimental film work Inhale–Exhale at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York this September.
The presentation marks Saint-Michel’s first screening at MoMA and places her work within a lineage of radical personal cinema shaped by filmmakers including Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Ken Jacobs, and Gregory Markopoulos. Presented as part of Long Live the Underground! Celebrating Six Decades of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Millennium Film Workshop, the series traces the history of New York’s experimental film movement from the American avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s through contemporary moving-image practice.
Bringing together filmmakers whose work has been fostered, distributed, or exhibited by two of New York’s foundational experimental-film organizations, the series traces a living history of personal, non-commercial, and formally radical cinema. Its programmes span the emergence of the American underground in the 1960s through contemporary experimental filmmaking.
Poster for Michèle Saint-Michel’s Inhale–Exhale, screening at The Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of Long Live the Underground!, 2026.
Saint-Michel’s Inhale–Exhale is a meditative experimental film exploring the body as both image and instrument. Through recurring gestures of breath, tension, release, and repetition, the work considers embodiment as a shifting relationship between interior experience and outward form.
The film belongs to Saint-Michel’s wider multidisciplinary practice, which moves across experimental cinema, poetry, sculpture, installation, sound, and performance. Her work frequently examines memory, recursive experience, bodily perception, language, and the unstable boundary between the intimate and the technological.
“This screening feels particularly meaningful because my work has always grown from the belief that cinema can remain personal, strange, embodied, and resistant to easy explanation,” says Saint-Michel. “To present Inhale–Exhale at MoMA within a history shaped by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Millennium Film Workshop is an extraordinary honour.”
Founded in 1961 by members of the New American Cinema Group, including Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, and Gregory Markopoulos, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative established an artist-led system for distributing independent moving-image work. Millennium Film Workshop followed in 1966, providing filmmakers with access to equipment, production facilities, and an ongoing platform for personal cinema.
Together, the organizations helped create the conditions in which American avant-garde, underground, and experimental film could be made, circulated, and encountered outside conventional commercial structures. Both remain active in New York today.
MoMA’s Long Live the Underground! series is organized across seven thematic programmes: Anticipation of the (Opening) Night; Roots and Radicals; 1970s Streams; Quotidian Pleasures (1980s–2020s); Cinemas of Transgression (1980s–2020s); New York No Story; and Diaries, Notes, and Sketches.
The series is organized by Joe Wakeman, Executive Director of Millennium Film Workshop; Matt McKinzie, Artistic Director of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative; and David Schwartz, President of the Board of Directors of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, with Ron Magliozzi, Curator, and Carson Parish, Associate Producer, Department of Film, MoMA, and Julia Curl, Marron Research Consortium Fellow, MoMA.
Exhibition and Screening Information
Michèle Saint-Michel, Inhale–Exhale
Part of Long Live the Underground! Celebrating Six Decades of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Millennium Film Workshop
Dates: September 23–October 8, 2026
Location: The Museum of Modern Art
The Debra and Leon Black Family Film Center
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019
Full programme and ticket information are available through The Museum of Modern Art at https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5931
About Michèle Saint-Michel
Michèle Saint-Michel is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, author, curator, and cultural producer. Working across moving image, sculpture, installation, poetry, sound, and experiential forms, she creates works that examine embodiment, memory, repetition, language, technology, and the construction of interior worlds.
Her films and artworks have been presented internationally. Her moving-image work has screened at Prismatic Ground in New York, the Manchester International Film Festival, and other festivals and venues, while her sculptures and visual artworks have been exhibited at Cubitt Artists, APT Gallery, Hypha Gallery South Bank, and elsewhere in London. Her writing has appeared in five books spanning poetry and interdisciplinary art, including Grief is an Origami Swan (Bad Saturn, 2020), and the Bloomsbury publication A Map of All My Tender Places (2026).
Saint-Michel is also the founder of the Artist Film Club and the Experiential Producers Room, an international community connecting artists, producers, cultural programmers, creative operators, and other practitioners shaping contemporary live experience.
She lives and works in New York City.
About Inhale–Exhale
Inhale–Exhale is an experimental moving-image work by Michèle Saint-Michel. Using breath as both structure and subject, the film studies the body through cycles of expansion, contraction, exposure, and retreat. Its repeated gestures create an intimate visual rhythm in which physical presence becomes a form of language.
The film features original sound and experimental music by Sam Carr and Dr. Sophie Stone.
Press and Enquiries
For interviews, screening information, press materials, or image requests, please contact:
Michèle Saint-Michel
https://michelesaintmichel.com/contact
