Thomas Allen Harris

Last Name: 
Harris
First Name: 
Thomas Allen

Born 1962, and raised in the Bronx and Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania, Harris earned his BA from Harvard University and later attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. Harris's performance based video works have been exhibited internationally including the 15th Pan African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (FESPACO Î97); Kunsthalle in Basel; Switzerland; the Whitney Museum of American Art's 1995 Biennial; and the 1997 Performance Art Festival in Cleveland, Ohio. After a career as a staff producer for public television and two Emmy nominations, Harris completed the critically acclaimed and multiple award winning feature length fantasy documentary film VINTAGE * Families of Value. BLACK BODY (1992) is a video installation exploring the impact of racism upon the physical and psychic bodies of Alfrican-American communities, produced in association with the Experimental Television Center and broadcast on KQED and included in the NY Film Festival, and Images Film Festival. Harris's 1998 commissioned video and photographic installation, ALCHEMY, created in collaboration with Lyle Ashton Harris, was exhibited at New Langton Arts in San Francisco and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. In 1999 Harris was commissioned to create a new video installation, entitle AFRO (is just a hairstyle): Notes on a Journey Through the African Diaspora, at the Long Beach Museum of Art. An Associate Professor of Media Arts at the University of California, San Diego, Harris is a recipient of numerous awards from such notable institutions as the Peter Norton Family Fund, the Ford Foundation, Sundance, American Film Institute, the Jerome Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, the Paul Robeson Fund and the Lannan Foundation. Harris is currently completing his second feature film, E Minha Cara, a mythopoetic Odyssey of a North American filmmaker searching for the African face of Brazil.