For almost three decades, photographer Susan Mikula has worked with cameras and film that most professionals gave up on long ago: expired Polaroid stock, homemade pinhole cameras, and prints she never crops or digitally corrects. She is also the longtime partner of broadcaster Rachel Maddow, together since 1999.
For one 2023 exhibition in Provincetown, she lit part of the set by holding a flashlight in her teeth inside an unheated, dark bathroom, because there was no other practical way to see what she was doing. The film she used that day is no longer made. “It’s the only evidence I have of using one of these kinds of films that you can’t get anymore,” she told the Boston Globe. “It’s historic.”
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Born | 1958, Perth Amboy, New Jersey |
| Education | Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts |
| Known for | Polaroid and pinhole photography using expired instant film |
| Partner | Rachel Maddow, together since 1999 |
| Based in | New York City and western Massachusetts |
| Notable exhibitions | Rice Polak Gallery, Brattleboro Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum |
Table of Contents
Mikula’s Early Life
Mikula grew up between New Jersey and New Hampshire. Her family moved to Francestown, New Hampshire, when she was fourteen, after her father, a commercial airline pilot, was transferred to Logan Airport in Boston. He photographed informally on the job too: crash sites, hotel rooms, hobby shops. “Having a family which welcomed art made doing it seem possible,” Mikula told Provincetown Magazine.
She studied at Hampshire College, where she took classes in color theory, but never trained formally as a photographer. Before art became her full time work, she was an accountant, and had also tried, without much success, to sell short stories. The camera that changed her direction came later, in her thirties, an old Polaroid she found in a thrift store on Martha’s Vineyard. Her first solo exhibition opened in 1998, when she was around forty.
Mikula’s Photography
She shoots exclusively on instant film, much of it years or decades past its expiration date, using vintage Polaroid and pinhole cameras. She works only with available light. She does not crop her images or correct them digitally afterward. Whatever the film does on its own, streaking, staining, drifting toward yellow or blue as the chemicals break down, stays in the final print.
Some of her best known bodies of work:
- American Bond (2011), an industrial landscape series shot across Texas, California and Massachusetts
- u.X (2013), inspired by the Lascaux cave paintings in France
- Kilo (2017), shown at Rice Polak Gallery in Provincetown and the VOLTA art fair in Basel
- On the Cruising Cloud, The Interdicted Land (2017 to 2018), a U.S. State Department commission photographing the Texas border town of Laredo for the federal Art in Embassies program
- Moons of Neptune (2023), shot around Provincetown and the Outer Cape
- Island (2024), photographed at a granite riverbed on the Connecticut River in Vermont
Her photographs are part of the permanent collection at the U.S. Consulate General in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and have appeared in exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami and across New England. A piece from Kilo was listed among the works in “Persona: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self,” a group exhibition that ran at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston from February through May 2026.
Mikula has never disclosed her income, and no public filing supports the net worth figures, often cited around five million dollars, that circulate on entertainment sites. Her earnings come from gallery sales, book publications and museum commissions. Nothing beyond that is verified.
Susan Mikula and Rachel Maddow
They met in 1999 in Massachusetts. Maddow, then working on her doctoral dissertation, had taken a yard work job on Mikula’s property. Their first date was at an NRA event called Ladies Day on the Range.
“It was absolutely love at first sight. Bluebirds and comets and stars. It was absolutely a hundred percent clear.”
Rachel Maddow, on meeting Susan Mikula in 1999
By Maddow’s own account, it was also her first monogamous relationship. “I had never had a monogamous relationship,” she said. “I had never wanted to. But this was different.”
The two have been together since, but have never married. Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter in 2011, after same sex marriage had already gained ground in several states, Maddow said gay couples had spent generations building their own ways of recognizing a relationship without legal marriage, and that she worried gaining the same institutions as everyone else would mean losing something specific to that history.
Mikula has also influenced how Maddow appears on screen. She encouraged her to wear makeup on air and pushed for the plain gray suits that became a signature, on the idea that a plain outfit would keep the audience focused on what Maddow was saying rather than what she was wearing.
Maddow addressed their relationship publicly in November 2020, when Mikula became seriously ill with COVID-19. She called their relationship “the only thing at the end of the day that I would kill or die for without hesitation” and described Mikula as “the center of my universe.” Mikula recovered. Maddow, who has hosted her show since 2008, now anchors it on MS NOW, the name MSNBC adopted after a corporate split from Comcast in November 2025. She and Mikula were photographed together at a Broadway opening in New York in April 2025.
Mikula Today
Mikula is in her late sixties. She had work in a winter group show at Rice Polak Gallery in Provincetown in early 2026. She and Maddow have now been together twenty seven years, dividing their time between New York City and western Massachusetts.
