Photographer
Kelli Connell
Kelli Connell (b. 1974, United States) is an American photographer whose work explores identity, sexuality, and the construction of relationships through staged and digitally composed imagery. She is best known for her series Double Life, in which she portrays a lesbian couple using the same model, creating a seamless visual narrative of intimacy and duality.
Connell’s practice blends photography with digital manipulation, allowing her to question notions of authenticity, authorship, and representation. Her images often appear natural and candid at first glance, but are carefully constructed to challenge the viewer’s assumptions about identity and relational dynamics.
Her photobooks, including Double Life, are widely recognized for their conceptual clarity and innovative use of photographic techniques. For collectors, Connell’s work is significant for its engagement with gender and identity, as well as its contribution to contemporary discussions around constructed imagery and narrative within the photobook format.
Kelli Connell (born 1974) is an American photographer and educator. Her most notable work is the series ‘Double Life’ (1999–2008), in which she photographs herself as two figures, digitally combining images to create scenes that explore identity, intimacy, and the fluidity of selfhood. She has exhibited internationally and her photographs are held in major museum collections.
Selected Works & Key Projects
A source-backed introduction to individual photographs and significant bodies of work.
Selected photographs
2006
The Valley
The Valley is a chromogenic print from Double Life, dated 2006 and printed in 2012, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection. It is especially useful as a defining individual work because the Met identifies it with Connell’s decade-long project and explains the method behind its apparent two-person intimacy: multiple pictures of one model are digitally stitched into a seamless composite. The work was included in the Met’s 2012–13 presentation After Photoshop, where Connell’s practice represented subtle digital manipulation that remains believable while prompting reflection on photography’s relation to artifice. Its museum acquisition and exhibition establish a documented institutional basis for selection.
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2008 · Denton, Texas, United States
Head to Head
Head to Head is a 2008 inkjet print from Double Life depicting Denton, Texas, and held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Its importance is grounded in its direct participation in Connell’s central series: MoCP describes the portfolio’s consistent structure as one model performing two roles, with medium-format negatives digitally stitched to form a two-person scene. Within that method, this work is a concise example of Connell’s sustained examination of dualities—masculine and feminine, interior and exterior, fixed and changing—and of how viewers bring assumptions about identity to apparently documentary images. MFAH’s accession gives this individual photograph a documented collection history.
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2002
Picnic
Picnic, dated 2002, is one of the works presented by the Museum of Contemporary Photography in its Kelli Connell portfolio. It merits selection as an early, publicly accessible example of the project’s two-person fiction. MoCP explains that Connell stages scenes prompted by private relationships and uses Photoshop to join multiple medium-format negatives, while a single model performs both roles. The resulting photographs test the viewer’s assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, identity, and the social codes read into relationships. Picnic is therefore significant not merely as an early image, but as a documented instance of the formal system through which Double Life makes an invented encounter operate as a vehicle for questions about selfhood.
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2015 · Lake Ediza, United States
Betsy, Lake Ediza
Betsy, Lake Ediza is a 2015 pigmented inkjet print in the High Museum of Art’s collection, acquired in 2022 with Friends of Photography funds. It merits selection because it is a named, collection-held work from the body of photographs that Pictures for Charis develops through travel to locations associated with Charis Wilson and Edward Weston. The larger project uses such revisiting to study photographer–sitter relations and to reconsider gender, sexuality, relationships, desire, inspiration, and landscape from the twenty-first century. The work’s High Museum acquisition and its use as an official press image for the exhibition provide concrete institutional evidence of its prominence within this project.
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1997
Education
BFA in Photography from University of North Texas
Kelli Connell earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the University of North Texas. This academic foundation introduced her to analog and digital studio practices, which later developed into her composite digital technique. The program provided her with technical skills and theoretical exposure to contemporary art, setting the stage for her graduate work that would center on identity and gendered representation.
Source: Wikipedia Verified Sep 6, 2026
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2000
Education
MFA in Photography from Texas Woman's University
Connell completed her Master of Fine Arts in Photography at Texas Woman's University. During this period, she refined her conceptual approach, merging studio portraiture with digital manipulation. The MFA program encouraged critical inquiry into feminist and queer discourse, which profoundly shaped her subsequent work, particularly her series 'Double Life' that complicates binary notions of gender and sexuality through composite self-portraiture.
Source: Wikipedia Verified Sep 6, 2026
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2002–2009
Series
Double Life
'Double Life' is Connell's major series, in which she created composite photographs that place two distinct female figures in the same frame, often engaged in intimate or conversational relationships. Both figures represent the artist herself, digitally merged from separate negatives or files. By imaging a lesbian couple as two versions of herself, Connell explores the emotional and psychological dimensions of selfhood, desire, and partnership. The series was widely exhibited in museums and received critical attention for its inventive fusion of staged self-portraiture and early digital editing, challenging conventional notions of portraiture as a singular likeness.
Source: Wikipedia Verified Sep 6, 2026
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2012
Exhibition
Solo exhibition 'Double Life' at Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago
This solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography brought together more than a decade of Connell's 'Double Life' work, consolidating its significance in contemporary photography. The museum's institutional backing reinforced Connell's status as a leading voice in digital compositing and queer self-representation. The show traveled to various venues, and its catalog included essays by prominent curators, cementing the series as a key contribution to debates on identity in the 2000s.
Source: Wikipedia Verified Sep 6, 2026
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2013
Award
Guggenheim Fellowship
Connell received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, one of the most prestigious awards in the arts in the United States. The fellowship recognized her outstanding creative ability and provided financial support to pursue experimental projects. This recognition brought national attention to her work, broadening institutional and public appreciation. The award marked a peak in her career, allowing her to expand beyond 'Double Life' into new narrative and formal explorations.
Source: Wikipedia Verified Sep 6, 2026
Representation
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Kelli Connell is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York. The gallery’s artist page provides a professional biography, portfolio excerpts, and exhibition history, underscoring the gallery’s role as her primary commercial representative in the contemporary art market.
Verified 2026-09-06Yancey Richardson Gallery
Collection
Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago)
The Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) in Chicago holds at least one work by Kelli Connell in its permanent collection. This institutional affiliation confirms her significance within contemporary photographic practice and provides a public venue for her work to be accessed by researchers and audiences.
Verified 2026-09-06Museum of Contemporary Photography
Interviews: Kelli Connell on Double Life (opens a new site)
photo-eye’s interview focuses on Connell’s construction of Double Life. She discusses directing and photographing Kiba Jacobson with a stand-in, then removing evidence of the stand-in through compositing. The interview also records her use of film, contact sheets, and hand-cut collages to plan final composite photographs.
Aperture Releases Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis (opens a new site)
Aperture’s announcement of Connell’s 2024 monograph describes Pictures for Charis as a text-and-image project engaging Charis Wilson’s collaboration with Edward Weston. It identifies the book as copublished by Aperture and the Center for Creative Photography and outlines Connell’s use of new photographs and writing alongside Weston’s photographs.
Q&A: Kelli Connell (opens a new site)
In this interview, Connell discusses the development of Double Life and explains that she uses one model for two roles in a relationship in order to examine gender, sexuality, and identity. The conversation also addresses the project’s duration, its changing concerns as artist and model age, and the early development of Pictures for Charis.
Kelli Connell — PhotoWork, Episode 73 (opens a new site)
This PhotoWork episode features Sasha Wolf in conversation with Connell about Pictures for Charis. The program describes their discussion of Connell’s research into Charis Wilson and Edward Weston, her collaboration with Betsy Odom in portraiture and landscape, and the continuing concerns with photographer-model relations, gender, and identity in Double Life.
WATCH: Artist Conversation with Kelli Connell (opens a new site)
Photographic Arts Council Los Angeles presents this online video conversation about Pictures for Charis. Hosted by Hannah Sloan, it addresses photographer-sitter dynamics, gender, identity, and sexuality in Connell’s project, as well as her use of Edward Weston’s texts while traveling with her subject to California locations connected to Weston and Charis Wilson.
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