Gregory Harris
Gregory Harris joined the High in 2016 as the assistant curator of photography and was promoted to associate curator of photography in 2018. In his five years with the Museum, he led the department during the major 2018 collection reinstallation and has built the photography collection through key acquisitions of work by Dawoud Bey, Evelyn Hofer, and Mickalene Thomas, among other notable artists. He has curated more than a dozen exhibitions at the High, including Mark Steinmetz: Terminus (2017), Amy Elkins: Black is the Day, Black is the Night (2017), and Way Out There: The Art of Southern Backroads (2019), a joint exhibition with the High’s Folk and Self-Taught Art department. Harris was previously the assistant curator at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago and worked in the photography department at The Art Institute of Chicago. He earned a bachelor of fine arts in photography from Columbia College Chicago and a master of arts in art history from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Throughout his tenure at the High, Harris has led the Museum’s Picturing the South series, which launched in 1996 and supports contemporary photographers in creating new bodies of work inspired by the American South for the High’s collection. His forthcoming projects include the exhibition Picturing the South: 25 Years to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the series.
