DIRECTORS

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/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. In the mid 90s 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 the Tribeca Film Institute’s Reframe Collection. Her videos have screened internationally including Georges 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; Performa – the first biennial of visual performance; 3LD Art & Technology Center, NYC and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art.