Craig Harris is the Artistic Director of Interference Arts and is a composer, theater artist, writer and producer. Harris creates music, multimedia performance works, interactive sculptural environments, and creative story spaces. He has a decades-long commitment to arts-based community development, pursuing a wide variety of projects – incorporating new technologies that serve artists; implementing publishing, conference and festival platforms to facilitate sharing of knowledge and collaboration; and advancing creative facilities and organizational development projects. He employs future visioning research approaches to examine current artistic practices, and to illustrate how improved resources could better serve artists’ creative needs and audience experiences.
He is a recipient of the 2016 Right Here Showcase Commission, and he has received grants to support his work from the Hanson Institute for American Music, the McKnight Foundation Next Step Grant, the American Composers Forum/Jerome Foundation Composers Commission Project, Rimon: the MN Jewish Arts Council, and the Howard B. and Ruth F. Brin Jewish Arts Endowment Fund. He has collaborated with many artists and organizations, including Renée Fleming, Bradley Greenwald, Carei Thomas, Kira Obolensky, Stephanie Fleischmann, Judith Brin Ingber, and dance theater companies Ballet of the Dolls, Zorongo Flamenco, Off-Leash Area and Katha Dance Theatre.
He is a former President of the International Computer Music Association, and former Executive Director of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. In Minneapolis he has been Executive Director of Ballet of the Dolls and the Ritz Theater Foundation, where he led the initiative to renovate the Ritz Theater in Northeast Minneapolis, and has been Managing Director and Interim Director at the Playwrights’ Center. Harris received his Ph.D. in Composition at the Eastman School of Music.