Welcome, Sarah May!

We're thrilled to welcome Sarah May to the U this fall.

Sarah May (she/her) is a queer biracial Salvadoreña artist, poet, organizer, facilitator, and bruja. She graduated from the University of Utah with her BFA in Photography & Digital Imaging and her MA in Community Leadership with an Emphasis in Art & Culture from Westminster College. Sarah’s writing and visual work frequently weave together across multiple mediums, connecting to ancestry as a healing ritual and ceremony, and exploring identity as cyclical and evolving. Her art and community organizing focus on place-based rituals to reclaim and explore Indigenous heritage, queer embodiment, decolonizing paradigms, activism, and storytelling, centering the relationship with the body and personal identity as collaborative aspects of the larger natural world and local ecosystems. 

Sarah has long called Pia Appaa, Great Salt Lake, home. As someone who lives in the in-between of multiple worlds and identities, Great Salt Lake is a sacred place where she cultivated her magic into the artist and storyteller she is today and is a huge component of her work as a place-based artist. Sarah is an artist and co-founder of Making Waves Artist Collaborative, a community of artists, organizers, and vigilkeepers who cultivate lake-facing culture through participatory art and demonstrative love for Great Salt Lake. 

The Environmental Humanities Community Practitioner-in-Residence program is a semester-long residency funded by the Mellon Foundation for community leaders who use the tools of humanities and culture to further environmental and climate justice. Practitioners work with our students, offer a public lecture, and host a community engagement workshop for our students. Our partnership with Gender Studies this fall is funded by their Mellon Foundation grant. Sarah will be working with Gender Studies on a commissioned art piece for their 50th anniversary as well as working with students and faculty.