Sara Bennett is a New York-based photographer and former public defender whose work focuses on women serving life sentences, both inside prison and after release. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, she uses photography to draw attention to the human consequences of mass incarceration. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Museum of the City of New York, the Blanton Museum of Art, Photoville, and other institutions, and is held in several museum and university collections. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Her first monograph, Looking Inside: Women with Life Sentences (Kehrer Verlag, 2026), brings together more than a decade of work with women sentenced to life in New York State. It moves between prison interiors, bedrooms after release, Polaroids, letters, drawings, and handwritten statements, and ends with an afterword by Judith Clark, who served 38 years in prison. The book was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards 2026 in the First PhotoBook category.
