Michelle Handelman

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 confronts the things that provoke collective fear and denial – sexuality, death, chaos.

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 to become part of the counterculture drug scene, 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.

Handelman’s early short films Safer Sexual Techniques in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1989), Homophobia is Known to Cause Nightmares (1990), and Catscan (1990) were part of the New Queer Cinema movement, with screenings in the early editions of BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival, Frameline Film Festival, OUTFEST, and MIX: New York Experimental Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, where Handelman began personal and professional relationships with AIDS activists Jim Hubbard and writer Sarah Schulman.

She directed the ground-breaking feature documentary on the 1990s San Francisco lesbian S/M scene BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes & Sadomasochism(1995), described by IndieWire as “a queer classic ahead of its time, a vital archive of queer history.”  Her early work included 16mm black and white experimental films combined with performance.

She is also known for her artistic collaborations with Industrial Music pioneer Monte Cazazza throughout the 1990s.

Their explicit film Catscan (1990) broke into the art world through a series of guerrilla actions and together they built several bodies of visual work including The Torture Series (1992), Blood, Guts and Beauty (1994), and the essay “The Cereal Box Conspiracy Against the Developing Mind,” published in the counterculture anthology, Apocalypse Culture, by Feral House Press in 1990.

Handelman thinks of all of her work as “living” projects, as they change with each showing through new edits, reconfigurations, and different modes of display which she uses to re-contextualize each work within the contemporary time and place.

In the late 1990s, BloodSisters was at the heart of a censorship controversy when the NEA was up for ratification.

This controversial film was attacked in congress by the American Family Association for its depictions of radical lesbian sexuality and labeled as “deviant” by notable American congressmen.

At the time, California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and senator Barbara Boxer stood up for the film, calling it “significant and worthy of support."

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: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism, 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.

Michelle Handelman is best known for her feature-length documentary on the San Francisco leather dyke scene BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes & Sadomasochism (1995), which premiered at the 1995 Frameline International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival as part of the New Queer Cinema movement.

The film then went on to screen at over 50 festivals and venues in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, New York, Los Angeles, Melbourne – over eleven countries in all, with broadcasts on England’s Bravo TV and Channel 4, in addition to German, Italian, and Australian television.

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

In 1999, the film won the Bravo Award and the Grand Prize at the Manchester Film Festival.

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 2011, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for her film and video work.

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 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 Cente r, 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 also known for her video installations Hustlers & Empires (2018), Irma Vep, The Last Breath (2013-2015), and Dorian, A Cinematic Perfume(2009-2011).

In 2018, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art commissioned her film performance installation Hustlers & Empires, and in 2020, Kino Lorber released a newly restored version of her award-winning documentary BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes & Sadomasochism (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.

In 2020, a newly restored version of BloodSisters was released by Kino Lorber for its 25-year anniversary.

This resurgent interest in BloodSisters has shined a spotlight on its continued significance, with international screenings, reviews and interviews with Handelman continuing well into 2023.