Video History Project

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Thomas Allen Harris

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 African-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, entitled 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.

Summary

Thomas Allen Harris (born 1962) was raised in the Bronx and Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania; he earned a BA from Harvard and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. His performance-based video works were exhibited internationally, including FESPACO (1997), Kunsthalle Basel, the Whitney Biennial (1995) and the 1997 Performance Art Festival in Cleveland. After work as a public television staff producer and two Emmy nominations he completed the feature VINTAGE * Families of Value and the 1992 installation BLACK BODY. He co-created ALCHEMY (1998) and AFRO (1999), is Associate Professor of Media Arts at UC San Diego, has received awards from foundations and arts councils, and is completing the feature E Minha Cara.

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"Thomas Allen Harris." Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2011. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/thomas-allen-harris.

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Last modified 18 June 2011

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