Sharon Lockhart

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Her work often deals with the uneasy relationships between stillness and motion and truth and fiction. In particular, she is interested in the way these relationships become strained in documentary traditions.

During her fellowship, Lockhart will complete a new film and photographic series titled Lunchbreak. Motivated by shifts in the world economy and their effects on American labor and inspired by iconic twentieth-century images of the blue-collar worker, Lunchbreak documents the vital social space of the communal meal. As the film moves across New England labor communities, from one lunch break to another, the viewer is immersed in the workers’ lives, politics, and humor. Each of the film’s sequences is determined by the real time span of the workers’ break, beginning and ending with their meal. The film will be accompanied by a series of portraits continuing Lockhart’s photographic project that began with her series Enrique Nava Enedina: Oaxacan Exhibit Hall, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City, 1999. In contrast to the filmic portrayal of the lunch breaks, these still images will document the individuals working.

Lockhart received her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1993. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Rockefeller Fellow. Her films and photographic work have been widely exhibited at international film festivals and in museums, cultural institutions, and galleries around the world. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Fine Arts.