Photo by Trecey Cunningham
Amy Sall is a writer, researcher, collector-archivist, and cultural advisor based in New York, specializing in photography, cinema, and visual culture from Africa and its diasporas. She is the author of The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power (Thames & Hudson, 2024), a comprehensive study of postcolonial and contemporary image-making in Africa.
She previously served as adjunct faculty in the Culture & Media Studies department at The New School's Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, where she conceived and taught two courses: "The African Gaze: Visual Culture of Postcolonial Africa & the Social Imagination" and "Third Cinema & The Counter Narratives." Her pedagogical framework and broader practice integrate cultural studies, archival studies, human rights, and anticolonial, decolonial, and postcolonial thought.
Amy is the founding editor of SUNU: Journal of African Affairs, Critical Thought + Aesthetics, a postdisciplinary platform championing artistic, cultural, and intellectual production from Africa and its diasporas. She is also the founder and steward of The Sall Collection, a private assemblage of vernacular photography, printed matter, and ephemera with a pan-African focus.
As a cultural advisor and strategist, she partners with initiatives that advance African and diasporic artistic production and preservation through programming, education, publishing, exhibitions, archival work, and special projects. Bridging theory and praxis through a postdisciplinary approach, her work fosters ethical, critical, and accessible engagement with African arts, memory work, and culture, with particular focus on photography and the moving image.
Courses
Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2020 — The African Gaze: Visual Culture of Postcolonial Africa + The Social Imagination (Eugene Lang College; The New School University, New York)
Spring 2017 — Third Cinema + The Counter Narratives (Eugene Lang College, The New School University, New York)
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Syllabi are publicly available; CV is available upon request.
Dossier for The Sall Collection is available upon request.
Press kit is available upon request.
For consulting, collaborations, speaking requests and press, please contact info@amysall.com
*Images on homepage: Stills from La Noire de (1966), dir. Ousmane Sembène