about mkc photography

mkc photography is an eco-friendly, hand-made home decor company that creates gorgeous art and wares using salvaged wood and paper from damaged library books. Customers love to purchase our artwork both for themselves and for gifts because they know each piece gives new life to otherwise discarded materials. We’ve been making beautiful things by hand in our Philadelphia-area studio since 2009.

Michelle Ciarlo-Hayes is the award-winning artist, creator, and story-teller behind mkc photography. Until the age of ten, Michelle was certain the secret passage into Narnia truly existed and if she just rifled through enough closets and cupboards, she would find it. Fables, fairy tales, and legends have always enchanted Michelle, her favorites being those where feisty and daring heroines like Lucy and Alice run off to have wild adventures. She graduated from the University of Oxford, where she would read in the same gardens that inspired C.S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll’s imaginations, and her whimsical, witty, & joyful {with just a hint of quirky} artwork is still influenced by this idea of magical worlds that mingle with our own. She’s a former librarian (hence, all those salvaged books) and she creates every piece of artwork featured on her handmade wares.

Michelle is a member of MamaCITA (an award-winning artist collective), received the Artist Cultural Exchange prize for “Alone With the Stars,” her mixed-media piece honoring Amelia Earhart, and was named Runner-Up Entrepreneur of the Year (2017) by Handmade Business Magazine.

Visit mkc photography on Instagram and click the video below for a peek inside the studio! Questions about our work? Please visit our FAQ page or contact us and we’ll be happy to help.