Professor of Visual Arts and experimental filmmaker Christopher Harris and 2024-25 Hodder Fellow and choreographer Nami Yamamoto have been named 2025 USA Fellows by the United States Artists organization. They are among 50 selected artists or collectives working across 10 disciplines and hailing from 21 states, all of whom receive a $50,000 unrestricted cash award.
“I am honored to receive a 2025 USA Fellowship,” Harris said. “This recognition acknowledges the hidden histories that deeply inform my work and shape so much of our collective experience.”
Christopher Harris. Photo credit: David Harmantas
United States Artists (USA) claims to support artists in all practices working at all stages of their careers, recognizing artists across the country “for their groundbreaking artistic visions and unique perspectives within their field.” Awarded annually through a peer-led selection process, USA Fellowships are given in the following disciplines: Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing.
According to USA, Harris and the other fellows were selected from a group of nearly 500 artists and collectives. The organization notes that, “Deeply rooted in notions of origin and belonging, the 2025 cohort examines a breadth of lived experiences and cultural histories, engaging their communities in dialogues both past and present while charting paths for their collective futures.”
In making the Fellows announcement, USA Board Chair Ed Henry stated, “As we approach our 20th anniversary, the USA Fellowship takes an increasingly significant role in how we view the arts funding landscape. In addition to being an exceptional group of artists and practitioners, this year’s cohort of Fellows manifest the many ways in which USA, and the broader art world, consider the support of artists—at all stages of their career, in all areas of their lives, and during all moments in our shared cultural history.”
Professor of Visual Arts Christopher Harris teaches the fall course “Places & Spaces: Exploring the Narratives of Site in Film” on Nov. 20, 2024. Photo by Zohar Lavi-Hasson
Harris makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. He shares that he often draws on archival sounds and images, with his work featuring 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, Harris notes that his influences—among them Black literature, various strains of North American avant-garde film, and most significantly, all forms of Black music—are eclectic. Harris shares that working through incongruity and slippages, between sound and image, between past, present and future, and between absence and presence, his films, like the music from which they take inspiration, embodies the existential complexities and paradoxes of racialized identity in the U.S.
In an explanation of his approach to filmmaking, Harris commented that “As a frustrated musician, Black music is my first, next, and last teacher. That is, all forms of Black music (bebop, Motown, P-Funk, hip hop’s golden era, free jazz and beyond) prepared me to think and that inspiration has transferred to my artistic practice. I use filmmaking, i.e. sound, image, time, light and shadow, musically.”
Harris’ 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 solo screenings at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, 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.
In the video below, watch test footage provided by Christopher Harris for future iterations of Speaking in Tongues:
In addition to the USA Fellowship, Harris’ honors include a 2023-24 Andrew Mellon Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship from the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for the Arts, the 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Film/Video, a 2020–2021 fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a 2015 Creative Capital Award.
This fall, Harris joined the visual arts faculty at the Lewis Center for the Arts. Prior to Princeton, he was the F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor in film and video production at the University of Iowa, and he taught at the University of Central Florida. For his first semester at Princeton, Harris taught the course “Places & Spaces: Exploring the Narratives of Site in Film” and is now offering “Carceral Cinema and the Abolitionist Imagination” for the Program in Visual Arts this spring. He is also currently teaching the Spring Film Seminar and, in conjunction with that course, organizing a free weekly screening series entitled Seeing the Big Picture: An Experimental Film Series, which runs through April 14.
Nami Yamamoto. Photo Credit: Wolfgang Daniel
A current Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, Nami Yamamoto is an award-winning choreographer and educator from Matsuyama, Japan. She received a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for her production Headless Wolf, which was presented at Roulette in 2017. Her work has been funded by Creative Capital, Jim Henson Foundation, Creative Engagement by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, City Artist Corps, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and others. She has held residencies at Movement Research, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, New Dance Alliance, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Gibney DiP Resident Artist, Center for Performance Research, and, most recently, Baryshnikov Arts Center. Yamamoto has been on the faculty at Lehman College and has taught dance at New York City Public Schools through Together in Dance and Dance Makers at Movement Research. She served as a core member of the Artists of Color Council at Movement Research from 2020–2023.
Other artists connected to the Lewis Center who received 2025 fellowships include the Obie Award-winning multi-disciplinary design collective dots—Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, Andrew Moerdyk and Kimie Nishikawa—who have served as past lecturers in the Program in Theater & Music Theater. Past USA Fellows include recent Lecturer in Visual Arts and Princeton alumna Lex Brown ’12 and 2020-22 Princeton Arts Fellow Danez Smith, both members of the 2021 cohort.
View an interactive online gallery featuring the 2025 fellows
