About Sara Woolley
Sara Woolley is an award-winning illustrator and artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY who has been twice recognized by the New York Society of Illustrators and most recently by 3×3 Magazine of Contemporary Illustration. Of Colombian and American ethnicity, Sara’s exploration of cultural identity manifests itself in various forms throughout her work. This can be seen in her MFA thesis, Views from Macondo as well as in her current project, Los Pirineos: The mostly true memoirs of Esperancita Gómez. A natural storyteller and writer, Sara is also drawn to exploring themes of literature, folk tales, mythology, body image, and femininity.
Comfortable creating work in a variety of media, she has had the opportunity to show work in a multitude of diverse venues. She was an exhibiting artist and workshop presenter, showing life size puppets at the SOMA Art Center’s Puppetlove!, an annual festival of radical puppetry; an exhibiting artist in NYSI Dimensional Salon; and through her youth development career has been an exhibiting artist and curator for several Student Faculty shows.
Her current project is the three volume graphic novel Los Pirineos. Written by Sara’s mother, Leila Gomez Woolley and featuring Sara’s exquisite illustrations, Los Pirineos is a fictionalized memoir chronicling a young girl’s upbringing in and eventual exile from Colombia told through the lens of childhood imagination. Researched on location in Colombia with the help of a grant from the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC), Los Pirineos is at once deeply personal while giving voice to a common immigrant experience.
Sara is a graduate of the Academy of Art University, San Francisco California where she received a dual MFA in Sculpture and Illustration, and earned placement the AAU juried annual show, 3 years in a row. She has a BFA in Visual Arts from the City University of New York, Queens College from which she graduated with honors Cum Laude, and won the English Department Prize for Poetry.
When not actively working in her home studio on Los Pirineos or one of her many creative projects she serves as the Program Director for the Beacon Center for Arts and Leadership, an arts based not for profit education center in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
