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About Sarah...

Sarah has been actively involved in arts and photography for over 15 years as an artist, teacher, and community arts administrator. She believes that the key to inspiring, building, and sustaining meaningful, conscious relationships with ourselves, our communities, and our world is creativity. Sarah's mission with her work is to inspire individuals and communities to find and express this creative spirit.

Sarah's artwork is rooted in the photographic process and has traveled from traditional study -- years in the darkroom learning the intricacies of silver and light processes -- to exploring photography as new media in the contemporary world of digital cameras and computers. Her passion for the medium lies in the fact that it is a light process, creatively and technically light is the foundation, actual and infinite. After studying the arts at Lake Forest College (IL) and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest's Chicago Arts Program, Sarah began traveling abroad, Europe, the Middle East, Central America, as well as around the U.S., and really embarked on her journey with learning and integrating photography and creative process into her life and art. On one of her traveling journeys, she lived and worked at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, which initially opened and inspired within her visions of creating space, moving beyond the two dimensional image. It was there that she first began create installations, integrating other media, text, sound, light, objects, with her photography in order to create a deeper, more multidimensional experience.

In 1996, Sarah opened her first studio/gallery, Gallery S, in the Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago and in 1999 moved Gallery S to the Flat Iron Arts Building in Wicker Park, where the small studio/gallery became Vital Projects, a community-based photography studio that offered darkroom and studio rental, classes and workshops and exhibition opportunities. Through Vital Projects Sarah worked as the director of the studio and began teaching photography classes and independent study workshops. She also began to develop a deeper interest in the vital role arts and creativity play in reawakening the human spirit and in building community. In 2003, she moved her studio to the Switching Station Artist's lofts in the Garfield Park neighborhood and began working more closely with community-based arts, collaborating on interdisciplinary projects with local artists and organizations. From 2006-2008 she coordinated arts programs at the Association House of Chicago, a large social service agency in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, and served as a committee and task force member on Chicago's Building Communities through the Arts Humboldt Park Task Force and the Center for Community Arts Partnerships at Columbia College's Urban Missions Program.

Sarah currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and continues to work with individuals and groups teaching photography and inspiring creativity.
artist's statement

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2009portrait
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