Prize Winner 2026:
Sarah Lewis
Portraits of Sarah Lewis by Kevin J. Miyazaki
Sarah Lewis is currently the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and an associate professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and the founder of Vision & Justice. She has authored and edited over 60 publications including The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press, 2024), winner of the American Book Award; the best-selling The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (Simon & Schuster, 2014); the award-winning volumes Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press, 2021) and Vision & Justice (Aperture Magazine, 2016); Coreen Simpson: A Monograph (Aperture, 2025); and Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images (Aperture and The New York Times, 2024). Lewis was named to TIME magazine’s 2026 “The Closers” list, in recognition of her work toward greater equality in the United States. She has organized landmark convenings, founded a Vision & Justice Book Series, and curated exhibitions, including If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground (Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, September 2026). A sought-after public speaker, her mainstage TED talk, Embrace the Near Win, has over 3 million views. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, and The New York Review of Books, and her work has been the subject of profiles from Vogue to The Boston Globe to The New York Times. Lewis is the recipient of honorary degrees from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, and Pratt Institute, along with the Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship at Harvard University, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, the Arthur Danto/American Society for Aesthetics Prize from the American Philosophical Association, the Freedom Scholar Award from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and the Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography.