Sarah Meister

Sarah Meister is an American curator and author, currently serving as the executive director of Aperture. She joined the organization in May 2021 after spending over twenty-five years at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.^[1]

Early life and education

Meister earned her AB in Art History from Princeton University.^[2]

Career

Meister began her career at MoMA, where she curated numerous exhibitions focusing on photography and modernist movements.^[3]

Meister has led efforts to reissue Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959) as an Aperture title, and, with editor in chief Michael Famighetti, oversaw a refresh of Aperture magazine’s design in summer 2024.^[4][5][6] She played a key role in Aperture’s acquisition of its new headquarters.^[7]

In addition to her curatorial work, Meister was the lead instructor for the online course “Seeing Through Photographs,” served as co-director of the August Sander Project, and is the founding host of the Aperture PhotoBook Club.^[8][9]

Selected exhibitions

Some of her notable exhibitions include:

• Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964 (2021)^[10]
• Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (2020)^[11]
• Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction (co-curator, 2017)^[12]
• One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus Photocollages of Josef Albers (2016)^[13]
• From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola (co-curator, 2015)^[14]
• Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light (2013)^[15]