L. Kasmiu Harris

L. Kasimu Harris is a New Orleans-based artist whose practice deposits a number of different strategic and conceptual devices in order to push narratives. He strives to tell stories of underrepresented communities in New Orleans and beyond. Harris has shown in numerous group exhibitions across the US and two international exhibitions and has had five solo photography exhibitions.
This year, Harris was among 60 artists selected nationwide for State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and had a solo exhibition, Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges: Photographs by L. Kasimu Harris at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh. His work was also in group exhibitions at the Ford Foundation Gallery and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. His writing and photographs were also featured in ” A Shot Before Last Call: Capturing New Orleans’s Vanishing Black Bars” that was published in The New York Times.
Harris’s feature for Edible New Orleans was selected for the book Best Food Writing 2016 and he has penned food columns for the Bitter Southerner. And his essay, The Dismantling of Southern Photography was published in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s catalog, “New Southern Photography.” Harris has images in several publications including Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style, by Shantrelle P. Lewis by Aperture.
Harris earned a BBA in Entrepreneurship from Middle Tennessee State University and an MA in Journalism from the University of Mississippi. He is on the Board of Trustees at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, as well as the Board of Directors of the New Orleans Photo Alliance and is a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance and the Antenna Gallery Collective.
Harris was a 2018 Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock and is a 2020 Joan Mitchell Center Artist-in-Residence. He has also furthered his studies at the Fellowship for Young Journalists at the Poynter Institute and was selected for the Oxford American Summit for Ambitious Writers, where he studied with Jay Jennings for a week in creatively intensive workshops and manuscript critiques.
Harris was named one of 8 “Louisianians of the Year” for 2017 by Louisiana Life magazine. He has work in the permanent collections of Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, The Wedge Collection, and The Do Good Fund and others.