Thomas Allen Harris is an award winning media artist and cultural warrior whose work explores desire, the construction of family, and African diasporic communities.

His documentary feature film VINTAGE - Families of Value made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. and has since garnered numerous awards including "Best Documentary" at Atlanta Film and Video Festival and a Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Harris' shorts SPLASH, BLACK BODY and HEAVEN, EARTH & HELL have been featured in such festivals and museums as the American Film Institute, The World Wide Video Festival in Holland and Whitney Museum of American Art's 1995 Biennial.

Born in the Bronx and raised in Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania, Harris attended Harvard University and graduated with a degree in Biology. He began his career as a broadcast journalist. For over a period of five years Harris worked for WNET/Thirteen producing public affairs shows and documentaries including CRISIS: Who Will Do Science? which aired nationally on PBS in 1988. In 1990 he was twice nominated for Emmy Awards for his work as a staff producer on the public affairs show The Eleventh Hour.

Harris is a recipient of numerous awards and grants from such institutions as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Paul Robeson Fund, the New York State Council for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Black Maria Film & Video Festival. In 1984, Harris recieved a Henry Shaw year long traveling fellowship for extended study in Holland, France and Italy. In 1992, Harris completed a Helena Rubinstein Fellowship in Critical Studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program.

Currently, Harris' multimedia film and photography installation ALCHEMY, a meditation on the mysteries of African belief systems in the Americas, is on exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Harris is an Assistant Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego and is completing the script of his new mythopoetic film "E Minha Cara," shot in Brazil and West Africa in 1997.