Michael Betancourt

Michael Betancourt (born 1971) is a critical theorist, film theorist, art & film historian, and animator. His principal published works focus on the critique of digital capitalism, motion graphics, visual music, new media art, theory, and formalist study of motion pictures.

Betancourt was born in New Jersey in 1971. He enrolled at Temple University for film studies and received an MA in Film Studies at the University of Miami, studying under film historian William Rothman. He also received his Ph.D degree from the University of Miami in Interdisciplinary Studies, focusing on Art History, Communications/Film Studies, and History.

In addition to scholarly work, he has written popular articles and reviews on art, art theory, and culture for magazines, including The Atlantic, Make Magazine, Miami Art Exchange and Art Scene.

Betancourt's father is the archaeologist Philip P. Betancourt and his brother is the author John Gregory Betancourt. Michael spent his summers in both Crete and Greece and worked as a photographer on his father's excavation at Pseira.

His first film exhibition was Archaeomodern, shown at the Ann Arbor Festival of Experimental Film in 1993. In 1995, his film, a self-referential film in 30 sentences, won a Director's Citation award at the Black Maria Film Festival. Other works have screened in Art Basel Miami Beach, Contemporary Art Ruhr, Athens Video Art Festival, Festival des Cinemas Differents de Paris, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, the San Francisco Cinematheque's Crossroads, and Experiments in Cinema, among others. His video Telemetry screened as an installation during the first Athens Video Art Festival. Other installations were site-specific: as part of Art Basel Miami Beach, the Sites-Miami project in 2004, and at the South Florida Art Center's 800 Lincoln Road exhibition space as part of the Face-to-Face series in 2011.

Betancourt has been a professor of motion media design at the Savannah College of Art and Design since 2009.

Betancourt is both a historian and practitioner of visual music. He exhibited his videos at visual music showcases such as the iotaCenter and SoundImageSound. He created a system for designing abstract animations based on synesthesia that he uses in his animations.

Betancourt discovered that the inventor Mary Hallock-Greenewalt produced the earliest hand-painted films known to exist;^{[page needed]} these were used with the earliest version of her Sarabet machine that automatically synchronized colored lights with records. The Sarabet device was an early music visualizer of the type now included with computer audio-players. Even though these films were not designed to be motion pictures themselves, they were created with templates and aerosol sprays, which produced repeating geometric patterns in the same way as the hand-painted films of Len Lye from the 1930s.