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Christopher Harris


Christopher Harris (USA) was born in St. Louis in 1962. His films and video installations read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. His work employs manually and photochemically altered appropriated moving images, staged reenactments of archival artifacts, and interrogations of documentary conventions. His current project is a series of optically printed 16mm experimental films in conversation with canonical works of African American literature. Harris received a BA in Film from Webster University (1997) and an MFA in Film from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2000), where he completed his thesis film still/here (2001), now widely considered a masterpiece. His films have appeared at numerous festivals, museums, and cinematheques worldwide, including the 2024 Whitney Biennial, The Museum of Modern Art, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Locarno Film Festival, Arsenal Berlin, Anthology Film Archives, New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Brakhage Center Symposium, among many others. In 2019–2020, Harris received an Artist Residency Award from the Wexner Center for the Arts. He was also a featured artist at the 2018 Flaherty Film Seminar curated by Kevin Jerome Everson and Greg de Cuir Jr. His honors include a 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Film/Video, a 2023–2024 Mellon Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship from the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, the 2022 Ground Glass Award from Prismatic Ground for outstanding contribution in the field of experimental media, a 2020–2021 fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a 2015 Creative Capital Award, and a 2019–2022 Media City Film Festival Chrysalis Fellowship. Interviews with Harris have appeared in BOMB Magazine, Film Quarterly, and numerous other print and online journals. Writing about his films has appeared in periodicals such as CinemaScope Magazine and Millennium Film Journal. Harris lives and works in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is professor of Visual Arts at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts.





b/w, Christopher Harris, USA, 16mm > digital, 15 min, 2024

Shot on a single 100-foot roll of film and edited in-camera, b/w uses close focus cinematography of text from commercial house paint samples to suggest a mythology of light and shadow. The audience is asked to participate during the screening by reading the paint names aloud.

This film is now streaming globally online. Click here to view.





still/here, Christopher Harris, USA, 16mm > digital, 60 min, 2001

A haunting, uncanny energy summons the bodies of uninhabited spaces while subtly critiquing the forces that encouraged the area’s abandonment and neglect. Such meaning is achieved by patient, long tracking shots and fixed frames of decrepit buildings, empty spaces, and torn down structures that threaten to burst with ghosts; meanwhile, the sounds of unanswered ringing doorbells and telephones, and strings of disembodied voiceover, are occasionally woven into the images (one feminine voice describes a dream provoked by her father’s death and her return to St. Louis as “a memory of a dream of a memory,” which could describe the film itself). Yet for as much as it assesses the blight and decay of the inner city, still/here feels strangely triumphant, and not strictly elegiac, perhaps because Harris conjures so poignantly a feeling typically so elusive: that of a spiritual rupture born of historical and cultural erasure.
–Beatrice Loayza

This film is now streaming globally online. Click here to view.


These films are co-presented with Black Gold and Three Fold, Detroit.

Image credits: all artworks, stills, and portraits courtesy of the artist © Christopher Harris.

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Founded in 2020, Three Fold is an independent quarterly based in Detroit that presents exploratory points of view on arts, culture, and society in addition to original works in various media, including visual art, literature, film and the performing arts. We solicit and commission contributions from artists, writers, and activists around the world. Three Fold is a publication of Trinosophes Projects, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization located in the historic Eastern Market neighborhood in downtown Detroit. Click here to check out Three Fold’s events page and view a schedule of the publication’s on-site activities.

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