Michelle Handelman’s phantasmagoric video installations create complex spaces of ever-shifting queer identities, pushing against the boundaries of gender, race, and sexuality. Coming up through the years of the AIDS crisis and Culture Wars of the 1990s, Handelman has built a body of work that uses live performance and video to blur the line between fiction and reality. Exploring philosophical questions of existence, she confronts the things we collectively fear and deny: sexuality, death, chaos.

Handelman is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow. Her latest project Hustlers & Empires was commissioned by SFMOMA as part of their Performance in Practice series. She has exhibited at Broad Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MIT List Visual Arts Center, PARTICIPANT, INC, PERFORMA Biennial, The Henry Art Gallery, Guangzhou 53 Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Centre Georges Pompidou. Her films have screened at festivals throughout the world. During the 1990s, Handelman worked in San Francisco where she collaborated with Monte Cazazza, a pioneer of the Industrial music scene; she also directed the feature documentary BloodSisters, and performed in several films by Creative Capital Awardee Lynn Hershman-Leeson. Handelman’s writings can be found in QED: A Journal in LGBTQ Worldmaking, n.Paradoxa, Intl Feminist Art Journal, and Apocalypse Culture. She is an Associate Professor in the Film, Media and Performing Arts department at Fashion Institute of Technology.  Her work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, Filmmaker Magazine, and The New York Times.