MICHELLE HANDELMAN

(Director, Producer, Editor)

Michelle Handelman is a filmmaker, visual artist and writer who makes confrontational works about sexuality, gender and desire. Raised during the late 1960s, 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 sex industry. Her art developed through great struggle and loss throughout the era of the AIDS crisis and over the years, Handelman has voraciously traversed all these worlds, developing a body of work that investigates ways of looking at the forbidden and revealing the dark, subconscious layers of outsider agency.

 Her recent multiscreen installations Hustlers & Empires (2018); Irma Vep, The Last Breath (2013/15); Dorian, A Cinematic Perfume (2009/12); and This Delicate Monster (2004/07) are all large-scale, multichannel video and performance works that were successfully produced in partnership with multiple venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Broad Art Museum, MIT List Visual Arts Center, The Henry Art Gallery, Participant, Inc., and the Contemporary Austin.

She is a 2019 Creative Capital Awardee, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and has been awarded grants from New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Cultural Agency, and Creative Capital MAP Fund among others. Her work has shown internationally including SFMOMA, Pompidou Centre, Paris; ICA, London; Guangzhou 53 Art Museum; PERFORMA, Krannert Art Museum; Lincoln Center; REDCAT and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has been widely reviewed in The New York Time, Art in America, Art Forum and featured in catalogs for many exhibitions including Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde and Moving Time: Video Art at 50. Other projects include Passerby> Ghost Sites for the show public.exe: Public Execution (Exit Art, 2004) curated by Anne Ellegood and Michele Thursz; DJ Spooky vs. WebSpinstress M (2002) an animated collaboration with Paul Miller AKA DJ Spooky, and in 2007 Bloomingdale’s chose Handelman’s work for their Fall Art Campaign.

Handelman was based in San Francisco during the 1990s where she produced and directed the award-winning feature documentary BloodSisters, an in-depth look at the San Francisco leather dyke scene. She collaborated for many years with Monte Cazazza, a pioneer of the Industrial music scene. Together they created several bodies of work including The Torture Series (Sony Visions Award 1995) and the film Catscan (1990). She also performed in several films by Lynn Hershman-Leeson, collaborated with Eric Werner, co-founder of the industrial performance group Survival Research Laboratories, and worked on Jon Moritsugu’s film Terminal USA.

Handelman’s work is in the collection of the Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum; Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art; Kadist Art Foundation SF/Paris; di Rosa Foundation and Preserve, Napa, California; Zabludowicz Art Trust, London. Her fiction and critical writing appear in several anthologies including Inappropriate Behaviour (Serpents Tail, London 2001) and Apocalypse Culture (Feral House Press 1994). Handelman is a Professor in the Film, Media and Performing Arts department at the Fashion Institute of Technology, NYC. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.