Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is an associate professor of History of Art and Architecture, and African and African-American 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 bachelor's degree from Harvard University, an MPhil from Oxford University after she was awarded the Marshall Scholarship, an M.A. from Courtauld Institute of Art, and her Ph.D. 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 Obama's 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, story-driven 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 African-Americans." She is the co-editor 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 World/Random 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 Danto/ASA 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.
