Julie Harrison

Interviews from Yale Radio / Artists, Curators and more

Julie Harrison has been an artist in New York City for more than thirty-five years, moving between video, photography, painting, performance, installation, books and digital images. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards and has exhibited widely. From 2003–2010, Harrison founded and directed the Art & Technology B.A. Program at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, and currently works with Granary Books, publisher of artists books and works exploring the intersection of word, image and page.

Julie Harrison’s early time-based works in the 1970s traversed through private performances for video to multiple video camera/monitor performances and installations. A single-channel extension of these ideas was developed with image-processed videos, utilizing multiple-source systems in real time, produced on-and-off for a period of 15 years at the Experimental Television Center (ETC). During this time, Harrison recognized the importance of the collaborative process, working with other artists, writers, musicians, dancers, architects, and educators. She was an early member of the artists’ group, Collaborative Projects (Colab), participating in seminal theme shows and working in many capacities on the artists’ cable TV show, “Potato Wolf.” She was co-founder of Machine Language, a video art group, and later, through her own company, Julie Harrison Productions, produced and directed video art, documentaries and art educational videos which have aired on PBS nationwide and were featured in festivals such as the Toronto Film Festival, The World-Wide Video Festival in The Hague; Video Roma in Italy; Video/Culture Canada in Toronto; the National Video Festival in Los Angeles, among others.

Museum exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Museum of Arts & Design in New York, The Neuberger Museum/Purchase, The Albany State Museum, the Bronx Museum for the Arts, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Smith College Museum of Art, the Astoria Museum of the Moving Image (NY), Clark Humanities Museum, The Walker Art Center; and in Germany, the Staatliche Museum in Baden-Baden, the Munchner Stadtmuseum in Munich, and the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt.

Awards include the National Endowment for the Arts (2), New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Creative Artists Public Service Award (CAPS), Funding Exchange / Paul Robeson Fund, the Film Fund, Barbara Lathum Memorial Award, Colorado Video Award / 1st Prize from the Athens Film and Video Festival; Gold Apple / 1st Prize from the National Educational Film & Video Festival; Honorable Mention from the Atlanta Film and Video Festival.

Julie Harrison’s book and video works reside in the private and public collections of: The Getty, the Library of Congress, Harvard University, Brown University, University of California/San Diego, Yale University, University of Delaware, University of Iowa, University of Southern California, Scripps College, University of California/Santa Barbara, New York Public Library/Berg Collection, Albany State Museum, Staatliche Kunstalle, Stichting Kijkhuis, The Kitchen Center, Park Library (Central Michigan University), Experimental TV Center, Women Make Movies, Ampersand/Athens Center for Film & Video, Video Inn (Vancouver), Metropolitan Toronto Library, University of Connecticut, SUNY/Binghamton, and others.

Julie Harrison’s work is represented and distributed by Granary Books (New York), Women Make Movies (New York), Stichting Kijkhuis (Netherlands) and Video Out (Vancouver Canada). Learn more on her website.

diptych, untitled, graphite on paper, 2017

diptych, war series, archival pigment print, 2014-2015