Artist Bio
Sarah Marris-Swann is an artist from Utica, New York. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Nursing from Utica College in 2012 and spent a decade caring for people experiencing chronic homelessness, mental illness, and addiction. While working in healthcare, she also became active in equity work, advocacy, and the labor movement. During this time, she began to turn to art, music, and writing to process traumatic events.
Following her experience with pregnancy loss, the COVID-19 pandemic, and mounting frustration with the work of navigating an obfuscatory and Kafkaesque healthcare system, in 2023 she left the nursing profession to pursue art, community engagement, and advocacy through the formation of a creative reuse center in Utica. Her paintings explore themes relating to mental health, displacement, and loss of cohesion; centering mundane elements that become sacred through these experiences and creating surrealist scenes that capture intimate moments of transformation and the loneliness of the human condition.