Self -Portrait

Born in 1961 in Cleveland, Ohio, Anne Harris received her B.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri in 1986 and her M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art in 1988. Harris is best known for her self-portraits and portraits of women that challenge and unsettle portraiture conventions. Her portraits are troubling, unflattering representations of their subjects. Producing an eerie luminosity that lends to the anxiety felt by the images, Harris combines artistic techniques that harbor between realism and abstraction, as parts of the faces and bodies are more delineated and in focus while others blur away into indeterminate shapes. Harris has taught at various institutions, such as Bowdoin College, School of the Institute of Art of Chicago, and Massachusetts College of Art. She has received numerous honors and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1993), the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award (1997) and an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship for Painting (2005). Harris has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions and her work is held in the public collections of the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the New York Public Library, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.