Michael Bartlett studied at the Juilliard School in New York and the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. THE LITTLE GIRL WHO FELL FROM A TREE, a co-production for Tobis Filmkunst and Rialto Film Berlin was made in Berlin 's Babelsberg Studios and earned critical praise in Germany and stateside. It won the AFI Fest Best Editing Award, the Worldfest Houston Gold Award, and was an official selection of the Santa Barbara and Seattle International film festivals. The L.A. Weekly called it “exquisitely manipulative, wonderfully slick guessing-game psycho-thriller”. Seattle Post-Intelligencer called it "…sly and tricky… a film buff's dream of a movie… beautifully shot, excessively - even gleefully - manipulative and compulsively watchable.” The Houston Press called it "…(a) compelling tour of methodical madness ".

Bartlett's first film, the darkly comic Konzert Fuer Die Rechte Hand (Concerto for the Right Hand) won the Mannheim Special Jury and C.I.C.A.E. Awards, was selected for the Berlin International Film Festival as well as festivals in Barcelona, Madrid, and Portugal, and aired several times on German TV. He also wrote and directed several highly acclaimed opera-themed documentaries for German TV.
A California native, Michael left Europe for Portland on the off-handed praises of Gus Van Sant who he met in Berlin and Madrid. "In the few times we met, Gus always had good things to say about Portland, and that just stuck with me until I finally moved here myself in 2004."