Sarah Lewis

Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is an associate professor of History of Art and Architecture and African and AfricanAmerican studies at Harvard University Her research focuses on the intersection of African American and Black Atlantic visual representation racial justice and representational democracy in the United States from the nineteenth century through the present She received her bachelors degree from Harvard University an MPhil from Oxford University after she was awarded the Marshall Scholarship an MA from Courtauld Institute of Art and her PhD from Yale University Before joining the faculty at Harvard she held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art New York and the Tate Modern London She also served as a Critic at Yale University School of Art She is a frequent speaker and has lectured at many universities and conferences such as TEDGlobal SXSW PopTech ASCD and for a wide range of organizations from the Aspen Institute to the Getty to The Federal Reserve Bank She has served on President Obamas Arts Policy Committee and on the boards of the CUNY Graduate Center the Brearley School and the Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts She is a board member of Creative Time Thames Hudson Inc and Harvard Design Press and serves on the Yale University Honorary Degrees Committee She is author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller The Rise Creativity the Gift of Failure and the Search for Mastery Simon Schuster a layered storydriven investigation of how innovation discovery and the creative process are all spurred on by advantages gleaned from improbable foundations Her essays on race contemporary art and culture have been published in many journals as well as the New York Times the New Yorker Artforum Art in America and in publications for the Smithsonian the Museum of Modern Art and Rizzoli Lewis became the inaugural recipient of the Freedom Scholar Award in 2019 presented by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History to honor her for her body of work and its direct positive impact on the life of AfricanAmericans She is the coeditor of an anthology on the work of Carrie Mae Weems MIT Press which received the 2021 Photography Network Book Prize Her upcoming books include Caucasian War How Race Changed Sight in America Harvard University Press 2023 Vision Justice One WorldRandom House 2024 and Groundwork Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law Spring 2023 The article on which Groundwork is based published in Art Journal Winter 2020 won the 2022 Arthur DantoASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association for the best paper in the field of aesthetics broadly understood In 2022 Lewis was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow