Sarah Ross
Associate Professor
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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.