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.

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.