Michelle Handelman uses video, live performance and photography to make confrontational works that explore the sublime in its various forms of excess and nothingness.

Her background is a study in opposites–raised during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Handelman split her time between Chicago, where her mother was a fixture in the art world, and Los Angeles, where her father was a player in the counterculture sex industry.

Over the years Handelman has voraciously traversed both these worlds, developing a body of work that investigates ways of looking at the forbidden and revealing dark, subconscious layers of outsider agency.

Early Work

In the mid-90’s Handelman directed and produced the feature documentary BloodSisters (Bravo Award 1999), an in-depth look at the San Francisco leatherdyke scene that has just been re-released by Kino Lorber distribution.

Before moving to New York in 1999 Handelman collaborated for many years with Monte Cazazza, a pioneer of the industrial music scene in San Francisco. Their explicit film Catscan broke into the art world through a series of guerrilla actions and together they built several bodies of work including The Torture Series, the video Hope (1995 Sony Visions Award) and the essay The Cereal Box Conspiracy Against the Developing Mind, published in Apocalypse Culture 2, by Feral House Press.

While in San Francisco Handelman collaborated with Eric Werner, co-founder of the industrial performance group Survival Research Laboratories; performed in several pieces by Lynn Hersman-Leeson; and worked on Jon Moritsugu’s production “Terminal USA“.

Major Screenings & Exhibitions

Her videos have screened internationally including the Pompidou Centre, Paris; ICA, London; MIT List Visual Arts Center; Guangzhou 53 Art Museum; American Film Institute and 3LD Art & Technology Center, NYC.

Her performances have been featured at Participant Inc., NYC; Exit Art, NYC; The Performa Biennial; 3LD Art & Technology Center, NYC and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art.

She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, 2019 Creative Capital awardee, and has been awarded grants from New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Cultural Agency, MAP Fund and the Experimental Television Center Finishing Fund among others.

Recent Projects

Recent projects include Hustlers & Empires; These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves; and Doomscrolling, an integrated video performance with Shannon Funchess.

Publications

Her fiction and critical writing appear in several anthologies including Inappropriate Behaviour (Serpents Tail, London 2001) and Herotica 3 edited by Susie Bright (Plume Books, SF 1994).

Collections and Archives

Her work is in the collection of Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art; Kadist Art Foundation SF/Paris; di Rosa Foundation and Preserve, Napa, California and Zabludowicz Art Trust, London.

Handelman is a Professor in the Film and Media department at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York City. She lives in Brooklyn.