Speaker Series 2026
Black Visual Culture / Black Life
SARAH LEWIS
April 6 | Time and Location TBA
SARAH LEWIS is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the founder of Vision & Justice, a leading publishing and research initiative that examines the foundational role of visual culture in America’s representational democracy.
Lewis is the author of the award-winning The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press, 2024), which received the American Book Award, and the bestseller The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (Simon & Schuster, 2014). She has also edited the award-winning volume Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press, 2021) and “Vision & Justice” (Aperture, 2016).
Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, and the New York Review of Books. Lewis’s awards include the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, the Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association, the Freedom Scholar Award from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and the Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography.
Before joining Harvard, she held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern. Her mainstage TED talk, “Embrace the Near Win,” has received over 3.1 million views.
Additional Speakers:
Anaiis Cisco, Reighan Gillam, Mary Pena, Channell Russell, Malcolm Sen, Toby Sisson, C. Rose Smith