Since 2000 I have painted invented portraits based on collage. Copies of photos or in some cases, copies of paintings are cut apart and reassembled into figures of ambiguous gender. Fusing the features of both sexes creates a range of androgynous characters that may be straight, queer, hermaphroditic or just cross-dressing. My aim is to create portraiture that deviates from the conventional male or female, and to explore the resulting pictorial and conceptual possibilities.

Tales from the House of Gibson
A series of invented portraits inspired by Charles Hammond Gibson Junior and his museum. The paintings will hang in a fantastic three story, exotically wallpapered staircase in the Gibson House Museum at 137 Beacon Street in Boston from April to December of 2010.

Family Jewels
Portraits of a hermaphrodite master race combining images of Adolf Hitler and H.R.H. Queen Elizabeth the Second. Set against backgrounds after Hitler watercolors and images of English landscape, the master race enjoys a life of horseback riding and pretzel eating in an irrefutable state of omnigender.

Arcabascio, Carolyn. "Musings on a Master Race: The Drawings of Hannah Barrett". Glimpse | the art + science of seeing, autumn 2008, vol. 1, issue 1. (download the article)

The Secret Society
Fifteen pictures in a gray palette based on 19th-century photographs.

Copley Bastards: Quaternoculares Novae Angliae
Four-eyed Yankees. Based on portraits of married couples painted by John Singleton Copley in 18th-century Boston.

The Scientists
An array of fictional scientists in the lab at their day-to-day tasks: chilling cells, preparing medium, and lecturing. Based on collages of a real-life married couple who were practicing scientists at the Schepens Eye Institute in Boston.

Work from 2000 to 2003: Group Color and Black and White Portraits
Parent hybrids: can be seen either as an extended self-portrait or a genealogical experiment.