Sarah Lewis

Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is an art and cultural historian and founder of Vision & Justice. Her research focuses on the intersection of visual representation, racial justice, and democracy in the United States from the nineteenth century through the present. She is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University where she serves on the Standing Committee on American Studies and Standing Committee on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. At Harvard, Lewis pioneered the course Vision and Justice: The Art of Race and American Citizenship, which she continues to teach and is now part of the University’s core curriculum. She is the organizer of the landmark Vision & Justice Convening, and co-editor of the Vision & Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture. 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. Her published books and edited volumes include bestseller The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, translated into seven languages, Carrie Mae Weems, which won the 2021 Photography Network Book Prize, and the “Vision & Justice” special issue of Aperture magazine, which received the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography. Her forthcoming publications include The Unseen Truth (Harvard University Press, 2024) and Vision & Justice (One World/Random House, 2025). Lewis’s article Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law, published in Art Journal (Winter 2020), won the 2022 Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association for “the best paper in the field of aesthetics, broadly understood.” An in-demand public speaker, her mainstage TED talk received more than 3 million views. She has had op-eds, commentary, and profiles of her work published in outlets including The New York Times, Aperture, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Boston Globe. Lewis was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2022. In 2019, she received the Freedom Scholar Award, presented by The Association for the Study of African American Life and History for her body of work and its “direct positive impact on the life of African Americans.” Her research has received fellowship and grant support from the Ford Foundation; the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University; the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; the Whiting Foundation; the Lambent Foundation; and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Lewis currently serves on the boards of Thames & Hudson Inc., Creative Time, and Civil War History journal, and is a member of the Yale University Honorary Degrees Committee. Her past board service includes Harvard Design Press, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Brearley School, and The CUNY Graduate Center. She received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, an M. Phil from Oxford University, an M.A. from Courtauld Institute of Art, and her Ph.D. from Yale University. She lives in New York City and Cambridge, MA.