Kathleen Tunnell Handel is engaged in an immersive exploration of the affordable-housing subgenre of mobile home and manufactured housing communities. Her ongoing project “Where the Heart Is: Portraits from Vernacular American Trailer and Mobile Home Parks” includes images made, to date, within Maine, Georgia, California, New York, New Jersey, Texas, Arizona, Oregon, Massachusetts, and Colorado, archived and presented in the taxonomy and typologies she’s creating.
Tunnell Handel’s research, conversations with park residents and managers, and collaboration with sociologists, urban planners, and housing advocates ground her fine art aesthetic and inform her growing advocacy for affordable housing.
Earlier studies in life sciences at Cornell University, through being awarded a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, to ongoing photography related studies, have all contributed to Tunnell Handel’s deep interest in visual culture and themes of life systems and the human experience.
She lives in the Berkshires of Massachusetts and NYC.
