Sarah May
Profession
Senior Lecturer, BA Fashion Styling and Production
Person Type
Staff
Biography
Sarah May is a multi-disciplinary artist and fashion educator. As a Senior Lecturer on Fashion Styling and Production, her teaching practice takes a critical, activist and values-based approach. Employing an ecological framework, she specialises in utilising fashion as a drive for social change and purpose. Sarah has extensive experience of teaching styling (in the most expansive sense) as a technique to create stories that consider climate, racial and social justice, alongside sustainable production methodologies and research creation.
Her research intersects fashion ecologies, de-fashion (the role that fashion must play in degrowth) and critical walking pedagogies. She has presented her co created critical walking research at conferences abroad and in the UK. She is an Associate Member of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, LCF where she actively works alongside colleagues to develop workshops that explore the future of fashion education and hopeful critical walking practices within a fashion context.
Sarah works as an artist and creative producer to co create fashion and textile workshops with local and marginalised communities that have storytelling at their core and that bring people together through participatory fashion design practices. Sarah has delivered workshops for refugees, migrant children and school children in London and Sheffield, all of which look to bring people together through participatory fashion design activism.
She was the Director of Sarah May Studio for over 10 years, creating installations, props, sets and art direction for fashion editorial, advertising and live events. Her set design work focused on the physicality of the body, how the body and fashion encounter space and the intimate relationship between materials. Sarah was represented in New York and London by agencies Magnet and Industry Art between 2007-2016. Her work was published extensively including British Vogue, Japanese Vogue, Vice, Dazed and Confused, Nike and Selfridges. Her public speaking, fashion film workshops and charity work clients included The British Council, It’s Nice That and Arts Emergency.
She is a member of Fashion Act Now, an activist group demanding a radical de-fashion future.