PROFESSIONAL BIO & PROGRAMS

Professional Bio

Sally Edelstein is an award-winning New York collage artist, writer, and visual essayist who considers herself a visual archeologist, digging deep into American mythology and excavating the social fictions Americans have been told—and have told themselves—over the past century.

An incurable collector of vintage ephemera, Edelstein draws extensively from her collection in her hand-cut collages and visual essays. Her work examines American popular culture, particularly the imagery of the mid-20th century, and the ways advertising, media and cultural mythology shape—and fragment—our ideas about identity, gender, race, class and the American Dream.

Selected Exhibitions & Recognition

Edelstein received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited nationally at museums, universities, and galleries, including the Heckscher Museum of Art, the Museum of Sonoma County, the Arlington Museum of Art, Brown University, and the Reece Museum.

Edelstein’s work has received recognition from American Illustration, the Society of Illustrators, the Art Directors Club of New York, and the Society of Three Dimensional Illustrators.

She has lectured on postwar American consumer culture at Fordham University and The New School.

Writing & Publications

This Year’s Girl

Edelstein is the author and illustrator of This Year’s Girl (Doubleday), which uses paper dolls as a metaphor to examine the changing identities, roles, and expectations American culture has offered women.

Her essays have appeared in Ms., Lilith, The Independent, the New York Daily News, Next Avenue, The Ethel, Tablet, Kveller and NextTribe.

At Envisioning the American Dream, Edelstein has published more than 1,000 illustrated essays in an ongoing visual and written investigation of how American mythology is created, sold and absorbed—and how its cultural legacy continues to shape the present.

 Films & Visual Essays

Edelstein’s first short visual essay, Perpetual, grew from an essay originally published in Lilith. Drawing on Jewish family history, memory, and image, the film explores trauma, loss, resilience, and the unexpected solace she found in her family’s cemetery. Perpetual received Best Narration — Short Documentary at the New Bedford Film Festival.

Her latest film, I Am an American, began where so much of her work begins—with something she had saved: her third-grade civics book.

Assigned in a Long Island classroom in 1963, the little book taught her what being an American was supposed to mean. More than sixty years later, she returned to its lessons about democracy, equality, compassion, and the common good, using personal photographs, artwork, advertising, schoolbooks, and archival material to examine the distance between the America she was taught to believe in and the country she sees today.

Once again, the past became a way of looking at the present.

Screenings, Talks & Conversations

Sally Edelstein offers virtual and in-person film screenings, illustrated artist talks, lectures and conversations for universities, museums, libraries, historical societies and cultural organizations.

Drawing from more than fifty years of collecting American ephemera, Edelstein combines film, original artifacts, advertising, family photographs, schoolbooks, artwork and personal memory to explore how Americans learned to understand themselves—and how the cultural messages of the past continue to shape the present.

Programs can be tailored to audiences interested in American culture and history, visual culture, feminism and women’s history, advertising and media, material culture, memory, the American Dream, collage and visual storytelling.

I Am an American: A Film, an Archive, and the Stories We Tell About America

Built around Edelstein’s 14-minute visual essay I Am an American, the program combines a film screening with an illustrated artist talk, original artifacts from her collection, personal and cultural history, and audience conversation and Q&A.

Available as a virtual studio program or an in-person program for universities, museums, libraries, and cultural organizations.

Image & Ephemera Licensing

Envisioning the American Dream also serves as a gateway to Edelstein’s extensive archive of vintage American advertising, illustration, and ephemera.

Images from the collection are available for licensing to publishers, editors, authors, and other clients for books, articles, editorial projects, and related uses. Previous clients have included The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and St. Martin’s Press.

Edelstein currently lives in Huntington, N.Y.

Sally Edelstein Collage