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Michele Faith Wallace (born January 4, 1952) is a feminist author and daughter of artist Faith Ringgold. She became famous in 1979 when, at age 27, she published Black Macho and The Myth of The Superwoman, a book in which she criticized black nationalism and sexism. Her writings on literature, art, film, and popular culture have been widely published and have made her a "leader of a [new] generation of African-American intellectuals." The cogency and insightfulness of Wallace's essays on visual culture and its relationship to race and gender is typified by "Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture" and her afterword in the book Black Popular Culture (based on a groundbreaking conference organized by Wallace at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 1991): "Why Are There No Great Black Artists? The Problem of Visuality in African-American Culture". Her attention to the invisibility and/or fetishization of Black women in art, film, and television has inspired new critical thinking about race and gender in popular culture, particularly in what she has called "the gap around the psychoanalytic" in contemporary African-American critical discourse. Books like Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, for example, have been a galvanizing and highly influential force in both African-American and feminist circles. The real power of Wallace's writing--a commanding force evident in works as diverse as her essays on film and literature both for scholarly journals and popular essays, such as for the Village Voice--is a clarity and rigor that allows her to reach a broad and committed audience. Wallace earned her B.A. and M.A. in English from The City College of New York and has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University. She is Professor of English at The City College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

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