Born in Paris in 1932, Michele Cone went through the Holocaust in St. Etienne and Chambon-sur-Lignon in France, and recently published an excerpt on on that subject in the Three Penny Review Spring Issue 2024. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1951 and married Sydney M. Cone III (Terry) in 1952. In 1975 she published her first book, The Roots and Routes of Art in the 20th Century. She received a Ph.D. in French Studies from NYU in 1988. Her thesis became her second book, Artists under Vichy, published in 1992 by Princeton University Press. Her third book French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art Before, During, and After Vichy came out in 2001, published by Cambridge University Press. She has published articles about personalities during Vichy including Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, and Robert Desnos among others (see Academia.edu).

She taught theory in contemporary art at the School of Visual Arts for thirty years. She has written reviews and articles on the art from the ‘70s to the 2000s, lectured widely, and interviewed leaders in the field during those years, including Cady Noland, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, and Gary Simmons among others. She is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.