Carla Jay Harris (b. 1987) is an accomplished contemporary American multidisciplinary artist whose work in photography, installation, collage, and drawing has secured her a distinctive place within contemporary art. Trained originally as a photographer, Harris has in recent years developed a multidisciplinary practice that brings together her interests in image-making, space, and spectatorship, themes that continually inspire her and serve as a binding thread through all of her work. Her mission, as she describes it, is to document intellectual, emotional, and psychological environments.

Harris's turn toward installation grew out of her desire to create space for cross-cultural dialogue, and for her the making of such spaces functions as an outlet for political and social activism. This ambition gives her practice an unmistakable civic dimension even as it remains rooted in personal experience and formal invention.

Her creative process begins with a lengthy period of research and writing. Drawing on scholarly research, interviews, local history, and her own family archives, Harris grounds her work in lived experience before turning to the camera, either in the studio or on the street, to compose foundational images on film. She then scans these photographs into her digital studio, where they are combined with hand-drawn illustration and digital collage to produce her finished pieces.

Conceptually, Harris begins each project with an aspect of her own personal experience that she wishes to explore before evolving the work into a lasting statement on human nature. She describes the end-style of her work as narrative with a hint of fantasy. Archival and found materials from her research frequently find their way into her final compositions, and the resulting mixture of archival, documented, and imagined imagery allows her to transgress unwritten social laws and to encourage viewers to look differently and imaginatively at their own existence.

Harris's work has been exhibited widely and is held in significant contemporary collections, where it continues to be recognized for its ambitious synthesis of image, narrative, and social inquiry.