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Past SPE Annual Conferences

2018 SPE Annual ConferenceSpeakers

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Sarah Lewis

Sarah Lewis

Saturday, March 03, 2018 @ 6:00pm, Grand Ballroom Salon H

Evening Guest Speaker, Sarah Lewis

Sarah Lewis is the guest editor of the landmark "Vision & Justice" issue of >i>Aperture which received the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography. The issue was based on the topic of her first course at Harvard University and the related exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums. The issue was also made required reading for all incoming freshman at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts for the 2016-17 academic year.

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 for the Smithsonian, The Museum of Modern Art, and Rizzoli. Her current book project, which lies at the intersection of African American Studies, Art History, and Slavic Studies, is under contract with Harvard University Press.

Lewis is also the 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. The work has been translated into 6 languages to date.

Lewis is a frequent keynote speaker at many universities and conferences such as TED, SXSW, PopTech, ASCD and for a wide range of organizations from the Aspen Institute to The Federal Reserve Bank. Her work has been profiled in The New York Times, Vogue, and The Wall Street Journal.

She received her bachelor's degree from Harvard University, an M. Phil from Oxford University, 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 Trustee of Creative Time, The CUNY Graduate Center, the Brearley School, and the Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts.
She lives in New York and Cambridge, MA.

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