Sarah Meghan Lee, worked as a photojournalist for 15 years, first based in Rwanda, Africa, then New Mexico, and for 8 years in Mexico City, covering social, environmental and human rights issues. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Guardian (London), The Independent Magazine (London), Elle magazine, and Marie Claire. Sarah won first place in the 2005 Gordon Parks Photography Competition for a photograph she took in Haiti.
She became interested in photography while completing her degree in Eastern European modern history at Stanford University, including studies in Kraków, Poland, and Berlin, Germany. Photographing Eastern Europe in the early 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution, Sarah discovered that she wanted to pursue photojournalism as a career.
Sarah went to work as an assistant for the USA Today photo department in Washington, D.C., and in her free time volunteered for Shooting Back, a program that taught inner-city youth photography to document life in their neighborhoods.
In 1996, Sarah left Washington for Rwanda to work as a photographer for relief agencies. After several months photographing in refugee camps, she got her first newspaper assignment, for The New York Times. The photo was published on the front page.
While working in New Mexico, she began teaching intensive one-week workshops a couple times a year at the Santa Fe Workshops in 2000. She continued teaching for the Santa Fe Workshops in New Mexico and in Mexico for 14 years.
From 2002 - 2010, Sarah was based in Mexico City and covered stories throughout Latin America for major US and European newspapers. She covered land struggles in Guatemala, the 10th anniversary of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, public health issues in Haiti, and indigenous universities in the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua among many other environmental, human rights, and economic issues.
In 2014, Sarah earned her Masters degree In Media Studies at San Diego State University with a focus on the changes of work routines of photojournalists. She taught photography at the University of California at San Diego Extension, San Diego State University College of Extended Studies and internationally with the Fredric Roberts Workshops. Recently, Sarah and her husband, Morgan, moved back to Santa Fe, New Mexico to raise their children in the northern mountains of New Mexico closer to family.