Curator

Gregory J. Harris

Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography

Gregory Harris Headshot

Gregory J. Harris is the High Museum of Art’s Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography. He is a specialist in contemporary photography with a particular interest in documentary practice. Since joining the museum in 2016, Harris has curated over a dozen exhibitions that consider an array of topics including social justice, the intersections of photography and self-taught art, and distinct history of photography in the South. Most notably, he curated a major survey of Southern photography, A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 (2023), which exhibition toured nationally and was accompanied by a catalogue published by Aperture. Harris’s other exhibition projects include Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis (2024), Truth Told Slant: Contemporary Photography (2024), Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City (2023), Picturing the South: 25 Years (2021), Way Out There: The Art of Southern Backroads (2019), Look Again: 45 Years of Collecting Photography (2018), Mark Steinmetz: Terminus (2018), and Amy Elkins: Black is the Day, Black is the Night (2017).

Harris was previously the assistant curator at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, where he curated exhibitions including Sonja Thomsen: Glowing Wavelengths in Between (2015),  The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus (2014), and Studio Malick: Portraits from Mali (2012). He also curated and authored catalogues for the exhibitions We Shall: Photographs by Paul D’Amato (2013), Matt Siber: Idol Structures (2015), and Liminal Infrastructure (2015).

Harris also held curatorial positions at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he organized the exhibitions In the Vernacular (2010) and Of National Interest (2008). His essay “Photographs Still and Unfolding” was published in Telling Tales: Contemporary Narrative Photography (McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, 2016). Harris has contributed essays to monographs by Amy Elkins, Matthew Brandt, Jill Frank, and Mark Steinmetz. He earned a BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago and an MA in art history from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.