Michèle C. Cone is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and was long a member of the board of the American branch of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA/USA). She holds the decoration of Chevalier dans l’ordre des arts et des lettres from the French government.

Michèle C. Cone is a cultural historian with a Ph.D in French Studies from NYU whose scholarship focuses on the art world of France under Vichy and Nazi occupation. In her books, Artists under Vichy (Princeton, 1992), French Modernisms (Cambridge 2001) and in her essays in the Art Bulletin, the Art Journal, the American Historical Review, Modernism/Modernity, and Telos, she confronts the conditions under which the art world functioned in a country overtaken by the Vichy regime and the Nazi occupation. She also investigates the advent of Vichy, and the return to democracy after the Liberation. Her Vichy era archives are now in the Columbia University Libraries. 

Before receiving her Ph.D. from New York University in 1988 and more episodically afterwards, Cone participated in the New York art world, publishing widely on modern and postmodern art (Flash Art, Art in America, Art Magazine, ArtNews, and Artnet among others). Her first book The Roots and Routes of Art in the 20th Century was published in 1975 by Horizon Press. She taught Art Theory at the School of Visual Arts from 1980 to 2008 and has lectured in numerous venues in the United States and abroad. She also organized various panels and curated exhibitions.

Dr. Cone was born and raised in Paris except when she lived as a child in St. Etienne and Chambon-sur-Lignon during World War II. After receiving her Baccalauréeats with honors, she came to Bryn Mawr College from which she graduated at age nineteen. She married Sydney M. Cone III, a lawyer and law professor who died in 2020. She has two children and two grandchildren. Now retired and living in New York she is working on memoirs of her childhood, and editing the diary of her grandmother, a French adolescent of Jewish background growing into adulthood in the Paris of the Belle Epoque.