Christian Michelides
Christian Michelides (* July 19, 1957 in Graz) is an Austrian psychotherapist. He is the director of Lighthouse Wien.
Life and career
In 1973, Michelides started to work as an opera critic of a provincial newspaper called Südost Tagespost. After serving as an assistant director for plays of Eugène Ionesco and Thomas Bernhard in 1975 at Austria's National Theater, the Burgtheater, he achieved his high school diploma in 1978. Thereafter he studied arts, philosophy and history of theatre, as well as directing in Milano, Vienna and New York, while still publishing articles in Austrian and Italian journals.
In the 1980s, Michelides was a collaborator for the new founded magazine WIENER, then joined the ad agency GGK Wien and the marketing team of the Swiss watch Swatch in Biel. At the same time, he organized a series of exhibitions in Vienna and published some catalogues. He presented five young American photographic artists (John Dugdale, Marcus Leatherdale, Robert Mapplethorpe, Todd Watts and Joel-Peter Witkin) for the first time in Europe.
In the early 1990s, he served as an investigative journalist for the magazine FORVM and other publications in Austria and Germany. Michelides uncovered the membership of Thomas Bernhard in a conservative party organization called the Bauernbund, Rudolf Augstein publishing in the [...] paper Völkischer Beobachter, and finally disclosed Gertrud Fussenegger, Austria's then most prominent female author, as a former avid [...] worshipper. Michelides also discovered that the Austrian Academy of Sciences had secretly stopped awarding the Grillparzer Award, a prize for dramatists in the name of Austrian national poet Franz Grillparzer, and he researched and documented the expansionistic endeavours of großdeutsch-oriented Alfred Toepfer and his close ties to Joseph Goebbels.
Starting in 1994 Michelides changed his focus to human rights activism and the defence of minorities. In June 1995 he founded the first International Human Rights Tribunal in Vienna. Michelides served as an attorney general. The theme of the tribunal was the discrimination and persecution of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender-persons in Austria during the period from 1945 to 1995.
Michelides was the founder of the initiative Häfn human, that counselled and visited prison inmates, he fought against discrimination of people with HIV und AIDS and participated in grassroots organisations like Club Plus, Selfhelp Vienna and Social Work from underneath. From 1995 to 1997, Michelides chaired the Austrian Lesbian and Gay Forum (ÖLSF) and instigated Austria's first LGBT parade, called Regenbogenparade. In 1998 he started his social work for the homeless.
In 2000, Michelides founded Lighthouse Wien, a shelter for homeless [...] addicts with severe traumas, many of them HIV-positive. In 2002, he was graduated as a [...] and mental health counselor. Since 2009 Michelides conducts a psychoanalytic men's group, since 2010 he works as a group analyst in private practice.
Publications
- (ed.) Wiener Blut '83: Eine Gesellschaftskomödie mit Paten und Kindern. Vienna 1983.
- (ed.) Marcus Leatherdale. With texts by Kathy Acker and Christian Michelides. Molotov, Vienna 1983.
- (ed.) Fotografie '83. Austria's first photography art fair. Vienna 1983.
- (ed.) Lothar Rübelt: Das Geheimnis des Moments. [The Secret of the Moment], exhibition at Albertina, Vienna 1985
- (ed.) Memorandum über die Stiftungen des Alfred C. Toepfer und deren Zusammenarbeit mit der Universität Wien. Vienna 1991, 3rd edition
External links
de:Christian Michelides es:Christian Michelides fr:Christian Michelides