Thomas Allen Harris

Thomas Allen Harris is a filmmaker, animator and artist whose work across film, video, photography, and performance illuminates the human condition and the search for identity, family, and spirituality. A 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 at Yale University on media arts, visual literacy, and personal archiving as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of African American Studies & Film and Media Studies. Harris’s deeply personal films 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 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. At CMU, Harris spoke to students in Professor Johannes DeYoung’s Real-Time Animation course in the School of Art.