Michael Renov is Professor of Critical Studies and Vice Dean of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California where he has taught since 1985.  He is the author of Hollywood's Wartime Woman: Representation and Ideology (1988) and The Subject of Documentary (2004), editor of Theorizing Documentary (1993), and co-editor of Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (1996), Collecting Visible Evidence (1999), The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies (2008) and The Cinema's Alchemist: The Films of Peter Forgacs (2011).

In 1993, Renov co-founded Visible Evidence, a series of international and highly interdisciplinary documentary studies conferences that have, to date, been held on four continents. He is one of three general editors for the Visible Evidence book series at the University of Minnesota Press, which has published 25 volumes on various aspects of nonfiction media since 1997. In 2005, he co-programmed the 51st annual Robert Flaherty Seminar, a week-long gathering of documentary filmmakers, curators, and educators, creating 20 screening programs and filmmaker dialogues on the theme "Cinema and History."

In addition to curating documentary programs around the world, he has served as a jury member at documentary festivals including Sundance, Silverdocs, the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival and Brazil's It's All True. He has twice taught graduate seminars at Stockholm University and has led documentary workshops in Jordan for the Royal Film Commission and the Red Sea Institute of Cinematic Arts. Renov's teaching and research interests include documentary theory, autobiography in film and video, video art and activism, and representations of the Holocaust.