Filmmakers Christopher Harris and Nicolás Pereda will join the Lewis Center for the Art’s Program in Visual Arts faculty at Princeton University in July. Harris, appointed as a professor of visual arts, makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. Pereda, appointed as associate professor in visual arts, makes films that explore the everyday through fractured and elliptical narratives that weave together scripted narratives and documentary observation. They will begin teaching in the fall 2024 semester.
Photo credit: David Harmantas
Harris comes to Princeton from the University of Iowa, where he has taught since 2017, most recently as the F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor in film and video production. His work, often drawing on archival sounds and images, features staged re-enactments, hand-cranked cameras, rear-projection, close-focus cinematography, re-photography, photochemical manipulations, and screen captured video among other strategies. Like his production techniques, his influences — among them Black literature, various strains of North American avant-garde film, and most significantly, all forms of Black music—are eclectic. Working through slippages between sound and image, absence and presence, and time Harris’s films, like the music that inspires them, embody the existential complexities of racialized identity in the U.S. His current project is a series of optically printed 16mm experimental films in conversation with canonical works of African American literature. His films have appeared widely at festivals, museums and cinematheques, including an upcoming solo screening at the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Previous screenings include solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Locarno Film Festival, and Arsenal Berlin, a two-person screening with Su Friedrich at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, and group screenings at the New York Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. He is the recipient of the 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Film/Video, a 2015 Creative Capital Award and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and Chrysalis. Harris earned an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. from Webster University.
Photo courtesy of Nicolás Pereda
Pereda often collaborates with the theater collective Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol and actress Teresita Sánchez. His work has been the subject of more than 30 retrospectives and has been presented in most major international film festivals including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, New York, and Toronto, as well as in galleries and museums like the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Guggenheim, and Museum of Modern Art in New York. Pereda comes to Princeton from the University of California-Berkeley, where he has taught since 2020, most recently as an associate professor. From 2015 through 2019, he taught at Rutgers University, and during the 2014-15 school year, he taught at Simon Fraser University. He earned a B.A. and an M.F.A. from York University.
“The appointments of these two artists mark a transformative moment for the Visual Arts Program, as well as for the study of film at Princeton,” said Jeff Whetstone, director of the Program in Visual Arts. “Film’s history and impact on culture is taught widely across campus. Christopher Harris’ and Nico Pereda’s films contend with these histories and will thus become integral to university-wide conversations and research in film. Harris’ work fuses abstraction and musicality into the interrogation of the Black diaspora. Pereda creates narrative structures that weave in and out of scripted story and live documentary. These diverse approaches will offer students in the Visual Arts Program an expansive perspective on making films, and a glimpse of the possible futures for the medium of moving images.”
“I couldn’t be more thrilled to join the stellar faculty in the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts,” said Harris. “The visual arts offer a capacious context for the study and practice of filmmaking, so I am especially excited to work with the students as they explore new ways of looking at and listening to the world through the medium of film.”
Harris and Pereda will join Program in Visual Arts faculty Colleen Asper, Tina Campt, Martha Friedman, Deana Lawson, Pam Lins, Moon Molson, David Reinfurt, Joe Scanlan, and James Welling, in addition to Whetstone, and a number of distinguished lecturers and fellows.
Through the program’s courses, students have the opportunity to explore drawing, painting, analog and digital photography, sculpture, graphic design, animation, and special topics, as well as narrative and documentary filmmaking. Studio courses emphasize direct, hands-on art making under the guidance of practicing contemporary artists. Students can major in studio art through a Practice of Art track in the Department of Art and Archaeology in collaboration with the Program in Visual Arts or earn a minor in visual arts through the program in addition to their degree in a major. Each year about 25 seniors work individually under advisement of faculty on a body of work and a solo or small group exhibition.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Visual Arts and the Lewis Center for the Arts, including the more than 110 courses offered each year and the more than 120 performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts and lectures presented each year, most of them free.
