Michael Betancourt is a critial theorist, art historian, curator, and multi-disciplinary artist. His essays have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic; journals such as Leonardo, Semiotica and CTheory have published his essays; he has edited five books on visual music technologies invented by artists such as Thomas Wilfred, Mary Hallock-Greenewalt, and Oskar Fischinger. In the course of this research, he discovered the oldest surviving hand-painted abstract films, done in 1916 by inventor and artist Mary Hallock-Greenewalt.

He has exhibited his movies, site-specific installations, and non-traditional art forms in unseen, unusual, or public spaces since 1992. He began producing guerilla interventions in public spaces in 1996 with The TrueLife Ad Campaign, a project that assumed the form of a newspaper ad. Since then, he has produced a series of interventions in public spaces designed to provoke an active engagement with the viewer. His movies have been shown in galleries, festivals and art fairs internationally