Michelle Handelman facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Michelle Handelman
Portrait of Handelman by Rachel Stern, 2017.
Born	1960 (age 63–64) Chicago, Illinois
Nationality	American
Education	MFA Bard College, BFA San Francisco Art Institute
Awards	John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital, Art Matters

Michelle Handelman (born August 5, 1960) is an American contemporary artist, filmmaker, and writer who works with live performance, multiscreen installation, photography and sound. Coming up through the years of the AIDS crisis and Culture Wars, Handelman has built a body of work that explores the dark and uncomfortable spaces of queer desire. She directed the ground-breaking feature documentary BloodSisters(1995). Her early work included 16mm black and white experimental films combined with performance. She is also known for her video installations, including Irma Vep, The Last Breath (2013-2015) and Dorian, A Cinematic Perfume(2009-2011). In 2011, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for her film and video work.

Life and career

Michelle Handelman was born August 5, 1960, as the youngest of three children in Chicago, Illinois. Her parents divorced when she was ten years old, and her father moved to Los Angeles, while her mother stayed in Chicago and remarried several times, including a marriage to B.C. (Bud) Holland, a renowned Chicago art dealer. From 1974-1978, Michelle split her time between Chicago and Los Angeles.

During the early 1980s Handelman was based in Chicago where she attended the School of the Art Institute with fellow classmates: contemporary artist Dread Scott; photographer James White; founder of Issue Project Room, Suzanne Fiol; artist and fashion designer J. Morgan Puett; and writer David Sedaris. From 1982-1985, Handelman worked as a bartender at Cabaret Metro/Smart Bar the premiere concert venue and underground club in Chicago which brought punk, industrial and New Wave musicians to Chicago.

From 1986 through 1998, Handelman was based in San Francisco, where 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 (1994), which won the Sony Visions Award in 1995, the controversial film Catscan (1990), and The Cereal Box Conspiracy Against the Developing Mind (1994) for the cult anthology Apocalypse Culture. For several years they ran MMFilms, an independent distribution and film production company. While in San Francisco, she directed her feature documentary BloodSisters, winner of the UK Bravo Award. At this time, Handelman also performed in several films by pioneering artist Lynn Hershmann Leeson produced with ZDF/Arte including Twists in the Cord (1994), Virtual Love (1993), and Cut Piece (1993). She also collaborated with Eric Werner, co-founder of the industrial performance group Survival Research Laboratories and worked on Jon Moritsugu’s production Terminal USA (1994). Other collaborators during this period included artists from Re/Search Publications and members of the Industrial bands Throbbing Gristle, Coil, Psychic TV, and SPK.

In 1998, Handelman started to live full-time in New York City.

Handelman received her M.F.A. from Bard College (2000) and her B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute (1990). She was an associate professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design from 2007–2013. In 2013, she was hired as a full professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, where she helped found the FIT Film and Media undergraduate program. In 2023, she retired from FIT.

Handelman's work has screened and exhibited internationally, including the British Film Institute, London; Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Participant Inc., New York; Performa Biennial, New York; Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Guangzhou 53 Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; American Film Institute, Los Angeles and many other venues and film festivals. She is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (2011), and recipient of a Creative Capital award (2019). Beware The Lily Law, her moving image installation on transgender inmates, has been on permanent display at the Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia since 2011. In 2018, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art commissioned her film performance installation ... & Empires, and in 2020, Kino Lorber released a newly restored version of her award-winning documentary BloodSisters (1995) for its 25 year anniversary.

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

Writing

Handelman's fiction has been published in several anthologies. She has written extensively for Filmmaker Magazine, including interviews with director Kirby Dick and Beth B. “The Media Conspiracy Against the Developing Mind", was co-written with Monte Cazazza and is published in the anthology Apocalypse Culture (Feral House Press, Los Angeles).

Selected Filmography

Awards and honors

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

Her other recent accolades include a 2014 Art Matters Grant, a 2018 New York State Council on the Arts grant, and a 2018 San Francisco Museum for Modern Art (SFMOMA) Film and Performance Commission, all for her film project ... & Empires. In 2019, she received a NYSCA/Wave Farm Media Arts Assistance Fund Grant and was a Creative Capital awardee. She was an artist-in-residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation on Captiva Island in 2020.

See also

• List of female film and television directors
• List of LGBT-related films directed by women