Experiments and Disorders presents Looking Inside: Women with Life Sentences

An evening with Sara Bennett and two of the women she’s photographed who spent decades in New York State Prisons.

SARA BENNETT, a 2024 Guggenheim fellow, is a former public defender who primarily photographs women with life sentences, both inside and outside prison, as a way to draw attention to the problems of mass incarceration. Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries, including group shows at  Blanton Museum of Art’s Day Jobs, MoMA PS1’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration and the Museum of the City of New York’s New York Now: Home, and at solo shows including the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon, Photoville in Brooklyn, New York, and Rotterdam Photo 2023. Her work is in the collection of, among others, the John Hays Library at Brown University, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, and the Museum of the City of New York, and has been featured in such publications as The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker Photo Booth, and Variety & Rolling Stone’s American (In)Justice. She is a recipient of the 2026 Baxter Mid-Career Artist Initiative and the 2023 Emerging Laureate of the International Women in Photo Association. Her monograph, Looking Inside: Women with Life Sentences, has just been published (Kehrer Verlag 2026). She is also the co-author of The Case Against Homework: How Homework is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It (Crown: 2006).