Michelle Handelman


Michelle Handelman is an American video installation artist, filmmaker, photographer, performance artist, writer and professor. She is an associate professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology and currently lives in Brooklyn.

Work

She received her M.F.A. in 2000 from Bard College and her B.F.A. in 1989 from the San Francisco Art Institute. She was an associate professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design from 2007–2013.
Handelman's 2009 four-channel video installation "Dorian, a cinematic perfume" is based on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. It features the bio-fem drag queen Sequinette as Dorian, Armen Ra as Lord Henry, K8 Hardy as Sybl, Quin Charity as Basil and Mother Flawless Sabrina as Dead Dorian. It features music by Lustmord, Armen Ra, Nadia Sirota, Vincent Baker, and Stefan Tcherepnin. "Dorian, a cinematic perfume" has been exhibited at Participant, Inc., NYC; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin; Guangzhou 53 Art Museum, China; Dirty Looks Screening Series and Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia.
Handelman created the live multimedia performance, The Laughing Lounge for PERFORMA 05 the first biennial of visual art performance. BloodSisters her feature documentary on the San Francisco leather dyke scene is distributed by the Tribeca Film Institute's Reframe Collection
Handelman's fiction can be found in Coming Up, the world's best erotica Herotica 3 edited by Susie Bright and her article, The "Media Conspiracy Against the Developing Mind", co-written with Monte Cazazza is published in Apocalypse Culture 2
Cannibal Garden was a series from 1998–2000 featuring series of video loops and photographs.
Her work has shown at Georges Pompidou Centre, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; American Film Institute, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, MIT's List Visual Arts Center, and on PBS.

Filmography

Awards and honors

She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and 2010 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. In 1999 Handelman won the Bravo Award, Bravo television for BloodSisters.