Interdisciplinary artist and scholar Thomas Allen Harris is the creator and host of PBS series Family Pictures USA—which has broadcast to critical acclaim, garnering an audience of over 5.3 million. Since 1990, Harris has remixed archives from multiple origins throughout his work, challenging hierarchy within historical narratives through pioneering documentary and research methodologies that center vernacular images and collaboration. Family Pictures USA evolved out of Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, Harris’ socially engaged art project that combines film, video, photography, and performance into storytelling events in over 75 cities worldwide, interviewing more than 4,000 people about their family albums.
Harris is known for deeply personal mythopoetic films including É Minha Cara/That’s My Face, which won Best Documentary at OUTFest as well as the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Berlinale; Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela: A Son’s Tribute to Unsung Heroes, which won Best Documentary at the Pan African Film Festival and was nominated for the Truer Than Fiction Independent Spirit Award; and Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, winner of the NAACP Image Award for Documentary Film and an African Oscar, as well as Emmy and Peabody nominations. His work has been exhibited at major film festivals internationally as well as at MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial, and the Corcoran Gallery. Harris is the recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and United States Artist fellowships and is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). He continues to speak and teach on the value of the family photo album as a tool for social change and is a Professor in the Practice at Yale University.
Yale University Courses
This course looks at films that are redefining ideas around family and family narratives in relation to larger social movements. We focus on personal films by filmmakers who consider themselves artists, activists, or agents of change but are united in their use of the nonfiction format to speak truth to power. In different ways, these films use media to build community and build family and ultimately, to build family albums and archives that future generations can use to build their own practices. Just as the family album seeks to unite people across time, space, and difference, the films and texts explored in this course are also journeys that culminate in linkages, helping us understand nuances of identity while illuminating personal relationships to larger cultural, social, and historical movements.
This production course explores strategies of archive aesthetics and community storytelling in film and media. It allows students to create projects that draw from archives—including news sources, personal narratives, and found archives—to produce collaborative community storytelling. Conducted as a production workshop, the course explores the use of archives in constructing real and fictive narratives across a variety of disciplines, such as—participants create and develop autobiographies, biographies, or fiction-based projects, tailored to their own work in film/new media around Natalie Goldberg’s concept that “our lives are at once ordinary and mythical.”
