Michael James Aleck Snow CC RCA (December 10, 1928 – January 5, 2023) was a Canadian artist who worked in a range of media including film, installation, sculpture, photography, and music. His best-known films are Wavelength (1967) and La Région Centrale (1971), with the former regarded as a milestone in avant-garde cinema.

Michael James Aleck Snow was born in Toronto on December 10, 1928. He studied at Upper Canada College and the Ontario College of Art. He had his first solo exhibition in 1957. Snow exhibited with the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto throughout the 1960s, becoming even more involved with the gallery upon his return to Toronto in 1971. In the early 1960s Snow moved to New York with his wife, artist Joyce Wieland, where they remained for nearly a decade. For Snow this move resulted in a proliferation of creative ideas and connections and his work increasingly gained recognition. He returned to Canada in the early 1970s "an established figure, multiply defined as a visual artist, a filmmaker, and a musician."

His work has appeared at exhibitions across Europe, North America and South America. Snow's works were included in the shows marking the reopening of both the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2000 and the MoMA in New York in 2005. In March 2006, his works were included in the Whitney Biennial.

Snow's first wife was fellow artist Joyce Wieland, whom he married in 1956. The couple moved to New York City in 1963, but they moved back to Toronto about a decade later and divorced in 1976. In 1990, he married curator and writer Peggy Gale, and they had one son. He was the uncle of filmmaker and video artist Su Rynard.

Snow died from pneumonia in Toronto on January 5, 2023, at the age of 94. His papers are in the E.P. Taylor Research Library & Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

Snow is considered one of the most influential experimental filmmakers of all time. Annette Michelson, in writing about Snow, his 1967 film Wavelength, and his films in general, speaks of the impact of Snow's films, placing viewers in a "position to more fully understand the particular impact of Snow's filmic work from 1967 on, to discern the reasons for the large consensus given" to Wavelength when it was honoured with the Grand Prize at the 1967 Experimental Film Festival EXPRMNTL 4 in Knokke, Belgium, and that "Wavelength, [appears] as a celebration of the 'apparatus' and a confirmation of the status of the subject, and it is in those terms that we may begin to comprehend the profound effect it had upon the broadest spectrum of viewers...." Wavelength has been the subject of numerous retrospectives internationally. Film scholar Scott MacDonald says of Snow that "[f]ew filmmakers have had as large an impact on the recent avant-garde film scene as Canadian Michael Snow, whose Wavelength is probably the most frequently discussed 'structural' film."

Wavelength has been designated and preserved as a masterwork by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada and was named #85 in the 2001 Village Voice critics' list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century .

Snow's films have premiered in film festivals worldwide and five of his films have premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).^{[citation needed]} In 2000, TIFF commissioned Snow, along with Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg, to make a series of short films collectively titled Preludes, for the 25th Anniversary of the festival.^{[citation needed]}