Sarah Lewis

“The Unseen Truth isn’t just a groundbreaking work of visionary scholarship. It’s an earthquake.”—Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard Professor

“Every two minutes we create as many images as were created in the entire 19th century,” says Sarah Elizabeth Lewis. “We’re reading images as much as we’re seeing them. There is a language and a syntax and a grammar to them.” And although we are voracious readers, how literate are we? Sociologists tell us that we’re engaging less and less with those who are different from us, curating our own visual content that affirms our existing biases and beliefs. And this, Sarah says, distorts our notions of “who belongs, who counts, and what humanity looks like.”

Sarah is the founder of Vision & Justice, a catalytic civic initiative that reveals the foundational role visual culture plays in generating equity and justice in America. At Harvard, she pioneered the course Vision and Justice: The Art of Race and American Citizenship, which she continues to teach and which is now part of the university’s core curriculum.

Her forthcoming book, The Unseen Truth, tells the story of the Caucasian war—the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the U.S. Civil War—and how it showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness actually wasn’t white at all. She reveals how visual tactics concealed the truth in order to secure our regime of racial injustice, and how we can begin to see what we have ignored and start to dismantle this regime. Harvard professor Imani Perry says that she “illuminates what it means to both ‘see’ and create race, deepening our ability to pursue justice.”

She is also the bestselling author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, a story-driven investigation into a biography of an idea—a big idea—that no current term yet captures. It reveals the secrets behind creative human endeavor, and how innovation, mastery, and new concepts are found in unlikely places. The New York Times writes that “Lewis’s voice is so lyrical and engaging that her book, The Rise, can be read in one sitting,” while Junot Diaz praises it as “exhilarating, inspiring, profound and so beautifully written it left me breathless.” It has been translated into six languages to date.

Sarah’s talks urgently address the world we are living in right now, gathering various threads—art history, technical innovation, race, photography, the story of America, and her own deeply personal narrative—to elucidate the power of art to ignite transformative social change. This combination of urgency, hope, and clear, compelling analysis keeps her lecture halls packed; it’s the reason her award-winning “Vision and Justice” issue of Aperture Magazine (now in its fourth printing) and forthcoming book The Unseen Truth have garnered unprecedented press coverage and changed the national conversation on race. Clint Smith, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed, says that “it is almost as if Sarah Lewis has given us a new pair of glasses that allow us to see history in ways that were previously unclear. Lewis has provided us with an indispensable resource to better see ourselves.”

Sarah has spoken to top-tier organizations from Prada to ABC to United Way. Her mainstage TED talk received over 2.8 million views and she was a closing speaker at SXSW. She was prominently featured in HBO’s Black Art: In the Absence of Light, a “rich and absorbing” documentary exploring two centuries of art by African-Americans, and the path they forged for contemporary Black artists. Sarah’s scholarship has also been profiled by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe, to name a few. She was on Oprah’s “Power List,” served on President Obama’s Arts Policy Committee, and was the inaugural recipient of the Freedom Scholar Award, presented by The Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The award honors Lewis for her body of work and its “direct positive impact on the life of African-Americans.”

An associate professor at Harvard University in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies, Sarah focuses on the intersection of African American and Black Atlantic visual representation, racial justice, and representational democracy in the United States. Her forthcoming publications include The Unseen Truth (Harvard University Press, 2024), Vision & Justice (One World/Random House, Fall 2025), and Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law.