BIO + CV
Artist Residency at Tides Institute and Museum of Art, Eastport ME, September 2020.
Julie Harrison is an artist in New York City who has moved between drawing, photography, video, painting, and performance.
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 (having taught there since 1992), and is currently associated with Granary Books, publisher of work exploring the intersection of word, image and page.
Julie Harrison was a pioneer user of the early Sony Portapak analog video system, creating her first video/performance in 1974 while attending the University of New Mexico. Her early time-based works traversed through private performances for video to single- and multiple-video camera/monitor performances and installations. Having performed and toured with New Mexico Danceworks from 1974–1976, she moved to New York City in 1976 and continued to work with dancers, most notably Simone Forti (1978) culminating in a performance of “Huddle” at the MoMA Sculpture Garden, and Grommet events spearheaded by Fluxus artist Jean Dupuy. Harrison was an early member of the artists’ group, Collaborative Projects (Colab) (1977–1984), was co-founder (with Willoughby Sharp, Susan Brittan and Wolfgang Staehle) of Machine Language, a video art collective (1984–1985), worked with image-processed videos on-and-off over a period of 15 years at the Experimental Television Center (ETC), and 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, among others.
In the 1980s, Harrison returned to painting and drawing and in 1993 she bought her first MacIntosh computer to convert video images to digital stills, combining her 2-D with her time-based work. After creating conceptual-based photographs throughout the 2000s, she began her current series of biomorphic drawings in 2016.
Museum group 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).