Kelli Connell

Kelli Connell was born in Oklahoma City in 1974 and is based in Chicago. She received a BFA from the University of North Texas in 1997 and an MFA from Texas Woman’s University in 2003. She began the Double Life project in the early 2000s, later revisiting it as Double Life, 20 Years. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds her work, and she has exhibited internationally.^*1

Connell’s central themes are doubleness of self, intimate relationships, sexuality, gender roles, internal conflict, and the difference between photographic document and constructed reality. She photographs one model in multiple roles and digitally joins negatives or image files so that two women appear to share a scene.^*2 Controlled lighting, body language, clothing, and ordinary settings produce scenes that viewers may first read as documentary; once the double performance is recognized, the tension between fiction and truth becomes active. Connell’s statement that photography lies as a document but can tell the truth as an image defines the core of this method.^*1 In an era when digital compositing became increasingly common, she used the technology not as spectacle but as a quiet way to test documentary belief and queer self-representation.^*4

The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes Carnival as part of a decade-long project built from multiple images of one model. The Museum of Contemporary Photography places Connell’s work within questions of identity and social construction. Lawndale Art Center’s 2004 text linked the work to photography in the digital age, surreal doubling, Cindy Sherman’s role play, and gender politics. Connell’s importance lies in using digital construction to make visible the emotional and social conditions that documentary photography alone cannot guarantee.^*4