Christopher Harris, Lewis Center for the Arts

Professor of Visual Arts

Photo credit: David Harmantas

About

Christopher Harris makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. Often drawing on archival sounds and images, his work 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 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.

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.

Harris is the recipient of 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 2015 Creative Capital Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Mellon Foundation, Radcliffe, and Chrysalis. He earned an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. from Webster University.

Prior to Princeton, Harris taught at University of Iowa, where he was the F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor in film and video production, and at University of Central Florida.