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Harris, Mark

Film and Television Production

Contact Information
Distinguished Professor
USC School of Cinematic Arts
Office: SCA 434
Phone:(213) 740-3319
E-mail: mharris@cinema.usc.edu

Background
Professor Harris brings his experience into the classroom, teaching courses in screenwriting and film production, concentrating on the documentary film. He was honored to receive his third Academy Award for directing and writing the feature documentary, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000).  His previous wins include Best Feature Length Documentary for 1988's The Long Way Home, and in 1968, The Redwood earned him the prize for Best Short Documentary.

In 2003, Harris' HBO documentary, Unchained Memories: Readings From the Slave Narratives, received two Emmy nominations. His most recent film is Darfur Now (2007) which he produced with Don Cheadle and Cathy Schulman.  The documentary, which focuses on six people who are trying to end the genocide in Darfur, won an NAACP Image Award and was nominated for Best Documentary of the Year by the Broadcast Films Critics Association and the National Board of Review.

Since 2006 Mark Harris has taught in the Global Exchange Documentary Program which brings USC and Communication University of China graduate film students together to make docmentary films about Los Angeles and Beijing.  

In 2008 Harris also co-produced Oceans Away, a 14-episode television series for China’s CCTV, which examined Chinese students who have chosen to study and live in America. He is currently working to adapt this series for American television.

In addition to short stories, screenplays, educational films, and his worldwide lectures and presentations, Harris is the author of five children’s novels, including Come the Morning, which received the FOCAL Award for Best California Children’s Book in 1990, two books of non-fiction, and numerous articles, including his latest, "Breaking the Cycle," an essay in Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War, which was published in 2008.

Serving as co-director of documentary production from 1985-1991, Harris supervised the production of 34 student-produced documentaries that have been shown on PBS, the Learning Channel, Discovery, the BBC, and Swedish television. The films won over 100 international awards, including two Academy Award nominations for Best Short Documentary.

For the last several years, Professor Harris has been lecturing about documentary film in China at Shanghai University, Hong Kong Baptist University, the Communication University of China, and at the International Forum on Anti-Fascist War and Television Films in Nanjing in 2005.  In the summer of 2006, he taught a 5-week documentary workshop at USC which paired six graduate film students from the Communication University of China with six USC students to make short documentaries about Los Angeles as a global city. Four of these films were broadcast on the Documentary Channel and also aired on Chinese television. The workshop was held in2007 and 2009, and in 2008 and 2011 at USC. In summer 2012 it will return to Beijing.

In early 2007, Professor Harris was appointed Distinguished Professor of Cinematic Arts by Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs C.L. Max Nikias. He is currently the head of the Advanced Documentary Production course.

Global Exchange Documentary Program Videos: available on the USC US-China Institute website and at our YouTube channel.