Sarah Lewis (curator)
Sarah Lewis is an author, curator and historian based in New York City.
She received her B.A. from Harvard University, where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a Rhodes Scholar finalist. Awarded a Marshall Scholarship for graduate study in England, she received her M.Phil at Oxford University in economic and social history and her M.A. at the Courtauld Institute of Art. In March 2014, she will submit her doctoral dissertation, under contract with Harvard University Press, in completion of her PhD degree in the History of Art at Yale University. Entitled Black Sea, Black Atlantic: Frederick Douglass, The Circassian Beauties, and American Racial Formation in the Wake of the Civil War, the project received support from the Ford Foundation, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, & Abolition.
Career
Sarah currently sits on the faculty of the Yale School of Art as a critic in both the Photography and Painting/Printmaking Departments. She recently completed her first book, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (Simon & Schuster, March 2014). Drawing on her work in the arts, The Rise offers the biography of an idea which no single current term yet captures: how the experience of what we often mistakenly call failure—negative reviews, abortive experiments, and bungled first attempts—can furnish the ground for improbable, often iconic transformations.
She has served on President Barack Obama's Arts Policy Committee and was selected for Oprah's 2010 "Power List." She is also an active curator, having held positions at both the Tate Modern and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2010, she co-curated the SITE Santa Fe Biennial with Daniel Belasco. That same year, in Vogue's Great American Women issue, she was profiled by Dodie Kazanjian. The piece, entitled "Brainiac Rising", was paired with a photograph by Annie Leibovitz. Her writing on contemporary art has been published widely in journals such as Callaloo, Artforum, and Art in America and has been featured in publications by Rizzoli, the Smithsonian, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
She sits on a variety of boards including The Andy Warhol for the Visual Arts, the CUNY Graduate Center, and The Brearley School.
References
- Vogue magazine, "Brainiac Rising," by Dodie Kazanjian, May 2010 ("Great American Women" issue). Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
- Interview on PBS' Tavis Smiley, 4 April 2014, on the occasion of the publication of Sarah Lewis' book, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery.