Harmony Korine (born January 4, 1973) is an American film director, screenwriter and artist. Korine was born in Bolinas, California and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. At an early age. he developed a passion for cinema and started using a Bolex camera.
Noticed by the photographer Larry Clark, he was asked to write the screenplay about skaters and to include in the plot a teenage AIDS experience. This screenplay turned into Clark’s first movie, Kids, which was released in 1995 (Korine was 22 years old at the time).
Following Kids, he directed Gummo (1997), on a budget of $1 million, and Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) made under the Dogme 95 manifesto. In the 2000s, he directed to Mister Lonely (2007) and Trash Humpers (2009) which received polarized reviews. Released in 2012, Spring Breakers was Korine’s first theatrical works to receive a wide release. The film received generally favorable reactions from critics.
Besides his career as a director, Korine also worked as a photographer and a painter. In the later 90s and early 2000s, he published several photography books and shown his work in several exhibitions. Lesser known is his abstract painting works of the 2010s using found materials, visual loops and repetitions.
His work has been shown in major exhibitions worldwide, including solo exhibition at Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Ghent (2000), Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, Nashville (2009) and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017). Self-titling his aesthetic approach “Mistakism”, he embraces the unplanned both as a director and as a painter. “I like not always having an endpoint and getting lost and trying to dig my way out of it. […] “It has to do with this alchemical idea of putting different elements into a glass and documenting the explosion. There is a strange poetry to it.”
Harmony Korine lives and works in Nashville, TN and Miami, FL.
