Thomas Allen Harris

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Thomas Harris is no longer able to join us in Provincetown for his residency.

Thomas Allen Harris is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and scholar whose work explores family, identity, and spirituality. Drawing on the rich canon of African American and African Diaspora literature and arts, he draws audiences into dialogues that transcend the barriers which separate people from each other. Harris’ work re-interprets concepts around identity, autobiography, and representation using a model of co-creative socially engaged practice. 

For over 30 years Harris has been creating deeply personal films that re-interpret the idea of documentary, autobiography and personal archive, including: Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela (2005), É Minha Cara/That’s My Face (2001),  VINTAGE - Families of Value (1995)., and the NAACP Image Award Winning, Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People (2014). Harris’ new projects include a film exploring his mother’s career as a chemistry professor and examining the unique challenges facing African Americans pursuing careers in STEM, and a film about the untold story BIPOC activism in the 1980’s around HIV/Aids and the queer creative renaissance.

The creation and touring of his films led Harris to create Digital Diaspora Family Reunion (DDFR), a transmedia project that explores  the rich and revealing narratives found within family photo albums across cultures.  Out of this methodology, in 2019, Harris created the PBS series Family Pictures USA, a new format of television which takes a radical look at neighborhoods and cities of the United States through the lens of family photographs, collaborative performances, and personal testimony sourced from their communities.  In 2021, Harris launched the Family Pictures Institute for Inclusive Storytelling to expand upon this work  through robust research, evaluation, scholarly discussion, and artistic interpretation. The Family Pictures Institute is based at Yale with hubs around the country.

Harris is a voting member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artist Award, a Dartmouth College Montgomery Fellowship, and Independent Spirit Award nomination. In 2022, Harris received the Poorvu Family Fund Award for Academic Innovation.

At Yale University, Harris teaches a theoretical course “Family Narratives/Cultural Shifts” as well as an interdisciplinary production course entitled “Archive Aesthetics and Community Storytelling. Harris lectures widely on visual literacy and the use of media as a tool for social change.

Michael Joseph

Michael Joseph is a street portrait and documentary photographer. Raised just outside of New York City, his inspirations are drawn from interactions with strangers on city streets and aims to afford his audience the same experience through his photographs. His portraits are made on the street, often unplanned and up close to allow the viewer to explore the immediate and unseen. Themes throughout his portraiture and projects include identity formation, found family, wanderlust, the human journey, the search for equality and human authenticity. His first monograph, "Lost and Found: A Portrait of American Wanderlust", was published Fall, 2023 (Europe) and will be coming out Spring, 2024 (USA) by Kehrer Verlag.

Michael’s work has been featured on CNN.com, Vice.com, AnotherMan.com, PaperMag.com, the Advocate, and published in magazines internationally including Elle, Inked, 1814 and SHOTS. He has been exhibited nationally, with solo shows at Daniel Cooney Fine Art (New York, NY) and the Soho Photo Gallery (New York, NY) and the FP3 Gallery (Boston, MA). Group exhibitions include the notable Aperture Gallery (New York, NY), the Getty Images Gallery (London, UK) and the Griffin Museum of Photography (Massachusetts). Notable museum exhibitions include “The History of Photography – Selections from the Museum’s Collection” at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and “Where Words Falter - Art and Empathy” at the Tang Teaching Museum of Fine Arts, a solon style exhibit where Michael’s work was in the company of Mary Ellen Mark, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and others. He has lectured at the International Center of Photography (New York, NY), the Savannah College of Art and Design (Savannah, GA), in portraiture classes at the New England School of Photography (Boston, MA) and taught at the Light Factory (Charlotte, NC). 

His portraits are held in the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston, TX) Fort Wayne Museum of Art (Fort Wayne, Indiana), the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts (Rochester, NH), the Jack Sheer Collection, Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery (Saratoga Springs, NY) and private collections. He is a 2023 and 2016 Photolucida Top 50 Photographer, 2020 Photolucida Finalist, and LensCulture Portrait Award Finalist. Michael was named “One of the Top 25 LGBTQ+ Film Photographers You Need to Know” by Analogue Forever magazine in 2021.  He is a recipient of the fellowship in photography from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation.

JU-EH

JU-EH is a visionary interdisciplinary creator with a unique perspective shaped by their diverse cultural background. As a male soprano, JU-EH specializes in developing nonhuman roles and using opera as a meta-emotional vehicle, bringing a fresh and innovative approach to this timeless art form. As a conceptual curator, JU-EH has initiated projects that defy genre, period, or easy categorization. 

JU-EH has collaborated with numerous nonprofit organizations to raise awareness of safe and caring environments for people of color artists and employees. The Milk Tea Opera House was recently launched as a pioneering concept combining performing arts and beverages as a placemaking act for the daily life of Nevadans. JU-EH would like to cultivate a creative space to meet where people are and to invite people who do not have professional training to interpret how art makings do not have prerequisites. MTOH aims to engage local residents in finding their own creative voice and expand the connection of our voice to be the place to meet who we truly are as the new definition of the opera house for the next 100 years.⁠

“My work speaks to my experience growing up in Southern China, being rejected in Europe as an opera singer, and redeeming myself as a creative New Yorker. I believe I have a unique position that reinvents the legacy of opera to imagine an intimate and immersive future for performances.

I was born in Canton, Southern China where I was immersed in the culture of Taoism and Buddhism. This gave me rather strong eatern philosophical roots in relationships, disciplines, and mindfulness. Then I traveled abroad to London, UK wanting to study music technology initially but surprisingly ‘derailed’ to a journey as an opera singer in the birthplace of many historic operas, because of the unique voice type - male soprano - a soprano voice living in an Asian male body in my case. This has created an identity crisis during my performing career in Western Europe and eventually turned into rejections and failures. During this bitter time, I managed to stay sane with two ongoing questions - what is my voice trying to teach me and how can this experience inspire the world?

10 years later, I am pursuing my ‘music technology dream’ with a much more specific task in the US: exploring alternative models to the traditional concert or operatic performance. This includes creations of a hybrid performance that breaks the boundaries of physical acoustic space, place, collective experience, and large-scale, digitally-enabled accessibility.

At the intersection of performance, music, and virtual space, I collectively engage listeners in the healing experience of spatial-sonic performance art. Not only my international career as an opera singer and equally astounding experience as a vocal experimentalist, I realize an experimental and process-oriented nature fits my art practice the most led by cross-disciplinary approaches. I often like to collaborate with sound designers, game developers and coders expanding the notion of the opera’s potential by exploring accessibility through digital tools and how gender, voice, and space can be mediums of emotion.

I would like to take advantage of omni-channel spatial audio and digital design, and center this technology within the legacy of Castrati carried through a 21st century interdisciplinary Cantonese Male Soprano. I would like to act as a creative director inspiring design teams to cultivate spatial conceptions of vocal production and timbre, including breath, emotion, craft, and space. As a result, this will create an enclosure for my voice avatar to digitally house the live vocal performances, as well as streaming as a live metaverse experience on the web. It aims to uncover how to bridge the hybrid future of performing arts, fine arts, and technology.”

Quil Lemons

Quil Lemons is a New York-based photographer, originally hailing from Philadelphia. His visual language is distinct and interrogates ideas around masculinity, family, queerness, race, and beauty. Quil’s work dances the line between the fantastic and realistic, resulting in disruptive images that feel like pure imagination, while simultaneously grounding us in references to our current cultural climate. His images can be found in publications such as Allure, Garage, i-D, Shadowplay, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Variety, and W, among others. His clients include Burberry, Calvin Klein, Givenchy, Guess, Gucci, Moncler, Nike, Nordstrom, SSense, and Valentino, among others.

Quil has exhibited at International Center of Photography, New York, 2021, in Lincoln Center at the American Ballet Theatre’s Fall Season, New York, 2021, Aperture’s New Black Vanguard, New York, 2019, Kuumba Festival, Toronto, 2019, and Contact Festival, Toronto, 2018. He has given artist talks at Fotografiska in New York, and ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. He launched a capsule collection with Sky High Farm Workwear titled “Farm Boys Do It Better” in February 2023 and is currently a Contributing Art Director at the brand. 

Synchronous

Synchronous is a creative lab and performance group driven by transparency, inclusivity, and individual voice. The members of the company combine their diverse skill sets to form a knowledge base which they utilize to fully realize their collective ideas. They create a network of support providing skills including but not limited to - administrative needs, grant research and application assistance, press release writing and development, and artistic mentorship throughout the creative process. At its core, Synchronous is a space in which the collaborators create the contemporary dance works that they want to see in New York City. The group consists of artists Emily Aslin, Celinna Haber, Maya Lam, Rachel Lee, and Stephanie Shin.

Stephanie Shin founded Synchronous in 2023. While freelancing in New York, Shin encountered multiple instances in which her jobs lacked transparency and communication from those in positions of power. Shin decided to collaborate with four other artists in order to create an environment that filled the gaps in the industry. In her words, Shin founded Synchronous because, “I craved a certain type of work that didn’t exist yet in NYC. I wanted to make the work that was missing, but also wanted to make a company reflective of the NYC dance community. These dancers are diverse, collaborative, and interdisciplinary individuals that mirror the larger freelance community.”   

Synchronous’s first full-length production, "SYNCHRONICITY" choreographed by Stephanie Shin, premiered March 10th and 11th, 2023 at Arts on Site in New York City, and was the recipient of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Creative Engagement grant. They presented an excerpt of "SYNCHRONICITY" Saturday, May 13th, 2023 at the CoreDance Festival at the Mark O'Donnell Theater in Brooklyn, New York. Stephanie Shin premiered new choreography with the collective at the We Belong Here: AAPI Festival 2023 curated by JChen Project and Arts on Site on August 19th, 2023 at Arts on Site entitled "On the subject of bananas". Synchronous premiered "Recognition", choreographed by Emily Aslin, at the Spark Theater Festival on November 17th, 2023.

Matika Wilbur

Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) is one of the nation’s leading photographers based in the Pacific Northwest. She earned her BFA from Brooks Institute of Photography where she double majored in Advertising and Digital Imaging. Her most recent endeavor, Project 562, has brought Matika to over 300 tribal nations dispersed throughout 40 U.S. states where she has taken thousands of portraits, and collected hundreds of contemporary narratives from the breadth of Indian Country all in the pursuit of one goal: To Change The Way We See Native America.