In her four-channel video installation, Descent into Hell (2021), the artist constructs a post-capitalist, post-COVID vision of Los Angeles within the preexisting world of GTA V. Throughout the film, Connolly draws attention to the overlooked scenes and sites within GTA V, like raging housefires, abandoned storefronts, and neon billboards, all eerily mirrored in footage from Los Angeles that she overlays throughout the film. The artist also inserts sounds from field recordings she has captured in and around her studio, infusing these simulated landscapes with the embodied sounds we encounter daily, like a cat purring or cars rushing past on a busy street. “I really like adding in real-world sounds, injecting some of the humanity of the place, or the experience of making it, back into this work that’s so cold or virtual on the surface.” Connolly’s film Anhedonia (2017) is a six-part machinima film built in The Sims III and The Sims IV, crafting a narrative that follows eccentric and dejected avatars as they perform the quotidian tasks native to The Sims gameplay, such as sleeping, eating, meditating, and spending hours in front of screens. As the film progresses, the characters begin experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations, confusing their online and offline experiences and highlighting the seepage between digital and physical worlds that many experience in their daily lives.

Connolly looks to her personal life for inspiration: from childhood memories to her surroundings, developing works that reflect the particularities of the late 1990s and 2000s, rural and suburban American life, and the early years of the internet. In works such as Hudson Valley Ruins (2016), the artist presents the story of two girls coming of age in the same region where she grew up. The artist also draws on her time spent in furniture showrooms and flipping through furniture catalogs as a young person, using them as reference and inspiration for the meticulous designs of interior spaces in her films. “The conventions of these furniture showrooms were bizarrely detail-oriented,” says Connolly. “Spending time in those simulated domestic environments was really influential.” In other works, such as The Mineral Kingdom (Dark Green) (2025), the artist references I, Spy books and the early internet of her childhood. Using generative AI referencing the imagery and aesthetics of the 1990s and 2000s, Connolly builds a fantastical post-human world taken over by a “mineral consciousness.”  Working across digital technologies, Connolly’s body of work reflects the alienation, anxieties, and slippages of the increasingly online twenty-first century.