A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Sarah Ross smiles at the camera in a black tee shirt. Her salt and pepper hair is cut short and she wears glasses.

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Sarah Ross

Associate Professor

Contact

Bio

Sarah Ross is an artist whose work is centered on the spatial politics of race, gender, class and control. Her projects use photo, video, installation and she works collaboratively with other artists and communities. Since 2006, Sarah has been working with incarcerated artists in IL prisons. 

In 2011, she co-founded the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project (PNAP), a cultural project that brings together artists, writers and scholars in and outside Stateville prison to create public projects. For more than a decade the project has hosted exhibition, painted community murals around the city of Chicago. In 2018 PNAP began college program at the prison in collaboration with Northeastern IL University. As of 2022, PNAP will be opening a gallery and community space on Chicago’s westside. 

Also since 2011, Sarah has worked closely with local artists, activists, lawyers, torture survivors and scholars on Chicago Torture Justice Memorials—a campaign for reparations for survivors of Chicago police torture. This project developed, in part, as a call to artists to imagine a memorial, and ended with a historic reparations package for survivors of torture by Chicago Police under former Commander Jon Burge. 

In other collaborative projects, Sarah has worked with Ryan Griffis to produce videos, photos and installations around the social and political impacts of land use issues and global agriculture. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Montreal, Copenhagen, Rio De Janeiro, among other places. She is a co-author of The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Toward Freedom (2019); Carving Out Rights From Inside the Prison Industrial Complex 2021) and Our Tuesday Girl: An Unfurling for Dr. Margaret T.G. Burroughs. 

Sarah is a Soros Justice Media Fellow and an inaugural recipient of the Leaders for a New Chicago award from the MacArthur and Field Foundations. Sarah has been awarded grants from the Propeller Fund, Graham Foundation, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts and the Illinois Art Council.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

The thesis tutorial course is designed to provide the student with the skills necessary to generate research questions, critically evaluate research studies, construct research design, and generate viable thesis project proposals. This will be accomplished through lecture and discussion, and the students developing a research proposal of their own design. The thesis proposal will be presented for evaluation to a professional panel review. The overall concern is that students develop thesis proposals which promise to yield original contributions to the field.

Class Number

2344

Credits

3

Description

This independent study requirement for candidates for the MAAE (Master of Arts in Art Education) or for the MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching) follows either the MAAE course ARTED 6109--Art Education: Thesis I: Research Methodology or the MAT course ARTED 5290--Graduate Art Education Thesis: Research as Social Inquiry. Students produce a thesis that demonstrates a student?s ability to design, justify, execute, and present the results of original research or of a substantial action research project. Students work closely with an assigned thesis advisor, in addition to participating in supporting workshops, presenting at the annual symposium, and defending the work at a final defense panel.

Class Number

2345

Credits

3