Thomas Allen Harris AB '84 didn’t leave Harvard imagining he would become a filmmaker, though the clues were already scattered across his senior-year schedule, from photography to creative writing classes. Coming from the Bronx High School of Science, he had arrived at Harvard not very confident in his writing; he left with a Henry Shaw Traveling Fellowship in hand as a confirmation of his creative spark. With it, he moved to Europe and embedded himself in immigrant communities in Paris, Amsterdam, and Milan. “I saw how film brought together photography and creative writing,” Thomas recalls, “particularly while learning foreign languages.” There, in French cinemas, he fell in love with the medium of film.

When Thomas returned to New York, he planned to attend NYU Film School. But when he was offered a job at the Children’s Television Workshop science show, 3-2-1 CONTACT, he ended up deferring his acceptance for three years until NYU finally drew the line. “By then, I'd started working as a producer. A lot of my early work was connected with science,” Thomas explains. He studied science at Harvard, and his mom was a scientist. This led to his first PBS national show in 1989: CRISIS: WHO WILL DO SCIENCE? The piece looked at the barriers that both women and minorities face in STEM. The program was so resonant and timely that it ended up being entered into the Congressional Record, augmenting the existing movement to further diversify STEM fields. 

After the success of his first piece, Thomas attended the Whitney Independent Study Program for artists. “I knew that I wanted to do stuff that was a little bit more experimental, and also a little bit more personal… I was inspired by another Harvard grad, Marlon Riggs, who produced a ground-breaking film entitled TONGUES UNTIED… We became friends. He was part of the queer media community. And I saw what was possible in terms of personal filmmaking,” Thomas says. “So I started making these experimental short films that were performance-based, and they were shown around the world.” Around this time, Thomas received a faculty position at UC San Diego, followed by tenure in 2000. However, he was still pulled back home towards the East Coast, to New York.

Then, the Ford Foundation awarded Harris a grant for what would become É MINHA CARA/THAT’S MY FACE, an award-winning, deeply personal, transcontinental film that premiered at Toronto before screening at Sundance, Berlin, and Tribeca. This led to him giving up his tenure, because “I was making films full-time. I was in the middle of this grant cycle where I was able to raise money to make films, and there seemed to be a lot of support… I worked on formally innovative personal films that illuminated larger social movements,” he says. 

Each project sent him deeper into family archives he hadn’t previously known existed, which led to his making of TWELVE DISCIPLES OF NELSON MANDELA: A SON'S TRIBUTE TO UNSUNG HEROES with his mother after the death of his step-father. It was a South African/U.S. co-production. THROUGH A LENS DARKLY: BLACK PHOTOGRAPHERS AND THE EMERGENCE OF A PEOPLE, inspired by Deborah Willis’s seminal history of Black photographers, was the production that followed. As he went through these filmmaking processes that merged the historical and the personal, Thomas realized that his own family-centered research process and participatory storytelling methodology could open doors for others. 

The result? DIGITAL DIASPORA FAMILY REUNION—a cross-country transmedia project that incorporates community organizing, performance, and virtual happenings to create an interactive form of storytelling—and FAMILY PICTURES USA, a PBS series that invited hundreds of Americans in cities across the country to share their family photos. Through these collective albums, Thomas and his collaborators mapped local histories and “told the story of the origins and present-day realities, and connected people through the shared bonds of living in a certain place at a certain time.” It also highlights communities that are normally overlooked, including Native Americans, immigrants, queer communities, etc., Thomas notes proudly. 

The production unfortunately came to a halt when the pandemic hit, as did life. But this gave Thomas time to begin a new film about his mother, Rudean Leinaeng. This one wasn’t about her work as an activist, though. Thomas notes there existed plenty of images that captured that side of her life in his family archive, but there were absolutely no images of her as a scientist. Despite the fact that he came from a family of photographers and that Rudean was the first Black woman professor of Chemistry at Bronx Community College, there was no record of this very important aspect of her identity. Obviously, that made creating a film about her much more of a challenge. But Thomas wasn’t deterred.  

The team received grants from Sundance, Black Public Media, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, PBS, Firelight Media’s William Greaves Fund, and other entities, beginning to piece together her story across formats. The grants didn’t come easily, and the most exciting and challenging to obtain was a $3.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation, including $800,000 to complete the film. The rest of the money was to fund a series called SCIENTISTS IN THE FAMILY, which was aimed at working with science centers around the country to use the FAMILY PICTURES methodology to surface stories of scientists, science activists, and how communities were using science, elevating STEM work through the lenses of family and community. 

But earlier this year, amid the wave of anti-DEI rollbacks, the NSF abruptly pulled the funding. “It was crushing,” Thomas says. Since then, he and his team have pivoted and recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to keep their edit suite open. They are still determined to finish the film in time for a 2026 world premiere and share his mother’s story. Thomas explains: “The film looks at this woman who fell in love with science and overcame all these odds, in terms of gender and race, you know, and about invisibility, not being seen… It's like a way to think about, or to give inspiration and a roadmap to people who are doing science. How do I succeed? How do I succeed when the world does not believe or see me as someone who's valuable in this way?” It’s the kind of story we need right now, and it also ties in the importance of scientific innovation and everyday scientific practices, asking, How does science impact our lives?"

Although we so frequently see a bifurcation between science and the humanities, Thomas is constantly working to unite them. “The role science played in my process, an art process, is the focus on a kind of methodology that then I take and I create these new things out of… It does feel a bit like each film is kind of like a lab,” Thomas smiles. “And in terms of thinking about the scientific method, to be able to prove certain things, to be able to document them… But also, notions of perception. A lot of my films are really about sight, and Ruth Hubbard actually did some amazing work on the eye. I grew up legally blind in one eye… When I was in school, I had to wear a patch over my good eye, so I could only see things in shapes and colors. I was very tuned to how light informed what I saw.” This idea of perception, of what’s on the surface versus what’s underneath, also threads through and inspires Thomas’s work.

Digging beneath the surface level of perception is what creates this sense of community present in all of Thomas’s films. “It's the sense of ideal around participatory storytelling… I either hand the camera off to other people who might not be filmmakers, or I invite them to be in front of the camera.” This process of co-creation adds a special sense of inclusivity and accessibility to the films that Thomas creates. Speaking about the work he does with his nonprofit, Family Pictures Institute for Inclusive Storytelling, he says, “My interest is creating a kind of secular yet sacred space. How can we drop a little bit of the mask, of our desire to protect ourselves, and just be open, and to be able to see people, not simply for how they present themselves, but to see them in relation to those things and people, and to be in affirmation with other people, and to be able to listen as people are telling stories and being vulnerable because I think that when you listen, there's a sense of the sacred yet secular space, and the vulnerability, and it transforms people.”