Kathleen Tunnell Handel

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kathleen Tunnell Handel is a photographer and videographer whose fine art aesthetic is grounded in the documentary tradition. Her immersive project - Where the Heart Is: Portraits from American Trailer and Mobile Home Parks is a long-term investigation of the essential affordable housing form of mobile home and manufactured housing communities.

Tunnell Handel’s extensive research, conversations with park managers and residents (many video recorded), and collaboration with related professionals, scholars, and housing advocates, all continue to inform her lens-based work and her growing advocacy for affordable housing.

Images are included from communities within California, New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Texas, Oregon, Arizona, Maine, and Colorado. Collaboratively made portraits and videoed conversations with mobile home and manufactured housing residents from a number of these and an additional eleven states including Wyoming, Iowa, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Florida deepen the project’s narrative and help amplify housing advocate’s voices.

Photographic work from Where the Heart Is has been acquired by both private and institutional collectors and, along with multi-media work, has been exhibited in group, solo, and pop-up exhibitions, and presented at conferences.

Tunnell Handel’s earlier studies in observational and systems based life sciences at Cornell University, through her exploration of the visual arts and receiving a BFA in Textile Design from the Rhode Island School of Design before practicing textile design professionally, to ongoing studies of lens-based mediums, have all contributed to her deep interest in visual culture and themes of memory, life systems, spatial justice, and the human experience.

She lives in New York City and photographs widely.

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