BIOGRAPHY
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​Christopher Harris’ films have appeared at numerous festivals, museums and cinematheques including solo screenings at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, MoMA, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Locarno Film Festival, Arsenal Berlin, and a complete retrospective at Anthology Film Archives; 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 Vienna International Film Festival, among many others. His film, still/here (2000–1), is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Walker Art Center.
 
Harris’ honors include a 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Film/Video, a 2020–2021 fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a 2015 Creative Capital award, among others. Harris is Professor of Visual Arts at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts and lives and works between Coralville, IA and Princeton, NJ.

FRAMES OF REFERENCE, SPRING 2026
CHRISTOPHER HARRIS
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PROGRAM ONE: Wednesday, February 18th - 6pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

Reckless Eyeballing (2004)
Taking its name from the Jim Crow-era of black criminals staring at white women, this hand-processed, optically-printed amalgam reframes desire by way of everything from D.W. Griffith to Foxy Brown and Angela Davis: 'Your lover belongs to this band of murderous outlaws.'
–Cinematexas International Short Film Festival
 
Halimuhfack (2016)
A performer lip-synchs to archival audio featuring the voice of author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston as she describes her method of documenting African American folk songs in Florida. The flickering images were produced with a hand-cranked Bolex so that the lip-synch is deliberately erratic and the rear-projected, grainy, looped images of Masai tribesmen and women, recycled from an educational film, become increasingly abstract as the audio transforms into an incantation. –Christopher Harris
 
Sunshine State (Extended Forecast) (2007)
Florida, 2007. Somewhere in a quiet outer suburb of the Milky Way galaxy, we live our lives in the pleasant warmth of our middle-of-the-road star, the Sun. Slowly but surely we will reach the point when there will be one last perfect sunny day. The sun will swell up, scorch the earth and finally consume it.
–International Film Festival Rotterdam
 
28.IV.81: Bedouin Spark (2009)
Approximates a small child’s fantasy world in the dark. In a series of close-ups, the nightlight is transformed into a meditative star-spangled sky. An improvisation, edited inside the camera and shot on a single reel. The stars swirl in silence. –International Film Festival Rotterdam
 
28.IV.81 Descending Figures (2011)
28.IV.81 (Descending Figures) comprises footage Harris shot at a performance of Christ’s Passion, staged as an attraction in a Florida amusement park…This flimsy display of devotion is shown up by something genuinely overpowering, or at least recognizably real. In a way, this seems to sum up Harris’s practice. Filmic images are things with actual impact in the world, and as such they have an unavoidable ethical dimension. –Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope
 
b/w (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.
–Media City Film Festival
 
Distant Shores (2016)
[A] postcard-sized [film that]…manage[s] to implicate the audience’s ethical imagination…Distant Shores models a necessary imaginative leap simply by juxtaposing footage of a Chicago River cruise with testimony of a migrant’s harrowing voyage at sea. A three-minute film edited in camera; it nevertheless offers several ways of thinking about displacement. –Max Goldberg, KQED Arts
 
Dreams Under Confinement (2020)
Frenzied voices on the Chicago Police Department’s scanner call for squad cars and reprisals during the 2020 uprising in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, as Google Earth tracks the action through simulated aerial views of urban spaces and the vast Cook County Department of Corrections, the country’s third-largest jail system. In Christopher Harris’s Dreams Under Confinement, the prison, and the street merge into a shared carceral landscape. –New York Film Festival
 
Speaking in Tongues: Take One (2024)
A film about Black ecstasy and the carceral forces arrayed against it. –Black Star Film Festival


PROGRAM TWO: Thursday, February 19th - 6pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

still/here (2000)
still/here is a meditation on the vast landscape of ruins and vacant lots that constitute the north side of St. Louis, an area populated almost exclusively by working class and working poor African Americans. Though it constructs a documentary record of blight and decay, still/here is a refusal of closure that dwells within the space of rupture and confronts the presence of a profound absence. –Christopher Harris
 
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