Filmmakers and Producers

Thomas Allen Harris

Thomas Allen Harris is a filmmaker and artist whose work across film, video, photography, and performance illuminates the human condition and the search for identity, family, and spirituality. Graduate of Harvard College and the Whitney Independent Study Program, member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and published writer/curator, Harris lectures widely on the use of media as a tool for social change. He lectures and teaches on media arts, visual literacy, and personal archiving at such institutions as Yale, Dartmouth, University of California, and many others. His deeply personal films - VINTAGE- Families of Value (1995), É Minha Cara/That’s My Face (2001), and The Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela (2005), have received critical acclaim at international film festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Toronto, FESPACO, Outfest, Flaherty, and Cape Town. His most recent feature film, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People (2014), which looks at the ways photographic representations serve as tools of representation and self-representation
through history, was nominated for both an Emmy and Peabody, and won over 7 international awards including the 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary Film. His latest short film, “About Face: The Evolution of a Black Producer” (2017) had its premiere on World AIDS Day at the Whitney Museum of American Art and over 100 institutions worldwide as part of Visual AIDS’ 28 th annual Day With(out) Art. In 2009, Harris founded Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, LLC (DDFR) a social engaged transmedia project that has incorporated community organizing, performance, virtual gathering spaces, and storytelling into over 45 unique audio-visual events in over 30 cities. With this project, Harris has toured nationally and internationally, as a Montgomery Fellow, and most recently as part of the Detroit ‘67 citywide commetion of the 1967 uprisings hosted by the Detroit Historical Society and the Detroit Institute for the Arts, to invite individuals to explore and share the rich and revealing narratives found within their family photo albums. To date, DDFR has brought over 3000 people together in live events and gathered in excess of 30,000 images, sharing content through social media, television, articles, newspapers, and radio to receive over 70 million impressions worldwide. Harris is bringing DDFR to national TV with Family Pictures USA, and the first airing was August 2019. Third World Newsreel is a community partner in the Family Pictures USA television project.His work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Sundance Institute, Tribeca Film Institute, The Fledgling Fund, Rockefeller Foundation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Creative Time Inc., and the Banff Centre. Born in the Bronx and raised partly in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, Harris currently lives in Warwick, New York with his life and producing partner Don Perry.

AVAILABLE FROM TWN

Black Body
Thomas Allen Harris
1992, 7 min., Color, US
Thomas Allen Harris uses text, special effects, and a single bound male nude to emphasize the humanity underlying the multiple definitions of black identity and subjectivity. The audience may be asked to read the captions aloud....

E Minha Cara
Thomas Allen Harris
2001, 56 min., Color, US/Brazil
A mythopoetic feast of self-discovery that crosses three continents and three generations, E MINHA CARA traces the filmmaker's journey to Salvador Da Bahia, the African heart and soul of Brazil, as he seeks the identity of the spirits who haunt his dreams. Paralleling the journey his mother made twe...

Encounter at the Intergalactic Café
Thomas Allen Harris
1996, 17 min., Color, US
A videotape of a live performance--a mythopoetic rendering of the original encounters between African, Indigenous and European peoples in the present day "border regions". Saint, comic, demon, deity, infant and other entities emerge and take over the body of the artist while three "anthropologists" ...

Heaven, Earth and Hell
Thomas Allen Harris
1994, 26 min., Color, US
Reflecting on the "trickster" figure in African and Native American cultures, while recounting the story of his first love, this beautiful work incorporates the critical texts of Frantz Fanon, bell hooks and James Baldwin....

Marriage Equality: Byron Rushing And The Fight For Fairness
Thomas Allen Harris
2011, 15 min., Color, US
A documentary that connects the Lesbian and Gay Marriage Equality movement with the Black Civil Rights Movement.

This documentary interweaves archival footage and photos with contemporary interviews to illuminate events surrounding the pivotal Massachusetts state constitutional convent...

Splash!
Thomas Allen Harris
1991, 10 min., Color, US
SPLASH is a fable-like tale of memory and emotion. Using a range of techniques, it deftly explores the interplay between identity, fantasy, gender, homosexual desire and pre-adolescence. These forces are but narrowly defined masculinity--particularly Black masculinity....

Vintage: Families of Value
Thomas Allen Harris
1995, 72 min., Color, US
VINTAGE is an experimental documentary which looks at three African American families through the eyes of lesbian and gay siblings--including the filmmaker and his younger brother. Three groups of queer siblings use video cameras to articulate the multiple stories that co-exist within the space of f...


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TWN is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Color Congress, MOSAIC, New York Community Trust, Peace Development Fund, Ford Foundation, Golden Globe Foundation, Kolibri Foundation and individual donors.