Sara Silks is an American artist working across photography and alternative photographic processes, known internationally for her experimental and materially driven approach. Raised between museum galleries and the untamed landscapes of the Ozark region, her practice is shaped by early experiences of observation, solitude, and a lasting connection to the natural world.

With a background in Visual Arts and Art History, including graduate study with honors, Silks brings an interdisciplinary sensibility to image-making. She employs analogue and experimental techniques, such as platinum palladium, cyanotype, and hand-altered surfaces to explore the relationship between process, perception, and meaning. Her work considers light as both a formal and emotional force, translating observed landscapes into images that feel at once constructed and ephemeral.

Silks has exhibited nationally and internationally, with presentations in museum and gallery contexts including the Lishui Photography Festival in China and a solo exhibition at Soho Photo Gallery in New York. She has been a featured artist in Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto and is a five-time finalist in Photolucida’s Critical Mass. In 2017, she was an international winner in two categories of the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, leading to exhibition in Barcelona.

Her work is included in publications such as The Experimental Darkroom and Platinotype, and her first monograph was published by Setanta Books in 2025, with international presentations spanning San Francisco, Europe, New York, and Paris. Her photographs have been featured in SHOTS Magazine, Lenscratch, and L’Oeil de la Photographie, and are held in both private and institutional collections, including the Aperture Foundation, Filter Photo, and the Spencer Research Library at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Influenced by Eastern philosophical frameworks and material-based traditions, her practice reflects an ongoing engagement with impermanence, environmental awareness, and memory. Through layered processes and intuitive exploration, Silks creates work that invites a slower, more attentive way of seeing, where atmosphere, sensation, and time quietly unfold.