Harris Barron (1926-2017) was an artist, educator, writer, pilot, and adventurer who founded both the ZONE visual theatre group and the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1970.

From 1956 to 1969 he was commissioned to design and execute many large scale architectural sculptures for new public buildings, collaborating with several prominent architects, including Walter Gropius, Hugh Stubbins, and Percival Goodman.

Their experimental "visual theater" company, ZONE—formed with former studio assistant Alan Finneran— performed a major work, The Yellow Sound, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and seeded the ideas behind the formation of the SIM program at MassArt.

In 1988, along with another pilot from the MIT Soaring Association Frank Scarabino, flew an antique, open cockpit biplane from Massachusetts to California over a seven-day period.

His original inspirations and ideas are still the foundation for many of the curricular decisions made within SIM in its effort to combine performance, innovative technology, sound, light, projected image, considerations of space, wherein idea-based art-making is stressed.

After joining the MIT Soaring Club in 1975, Barron, as an instructor-in-training, taught student pilots to appreciate "motorless flight"—sailplane soaring—"using the mind and acute observation of atmospheric changes to sustain the self at altitude."