Sarah Lewis is a rising intellectual star. Her book, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, has been hailed by a who's who of creative thinkers. Lewis Hyde calls it a “welcome departure from standard accounts of artistry and innovation.” Kirkus Reviews writes: "Creativity, like genius, is inexplicable, but Lewis’ synthesis of history, biography and psychological research offers a thoughtful response to the question of how new ideas happen."
Lewis appears on Oprah's “Power List,” served on President Obama's Arts Policy Committee, has been profiled in Vogue, and is currently the Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University. She has held positions at Yale's School of Art, the Tate Modern, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and her essays have been published in Artforumand The Smithsonian. Her second book, Black Sea, Black Atlantic: Frederick Douglass, The Circassian Beauties, and American Racial Formation in the Wake of the Civil War, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2015. She received her B.A. from Harvard, M. Phil from Oxford, and Ph.D. from Yale. She was a speaker at TED2014 in Vancouver, BC.