Sandra S. Phillips
American writer
Sandra S. "Sandy" Phillips (born 1945) is an American writer, and curator working in the field of photography. She is the Curator Emeritus of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She joined the museum as curator of photography in 1987 and was promoted to senior curator of photography in 1999 in acknowledgement of her considerable contributions to SFMOMA. A photographic historian and former curator at the Vassar College Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Phillips succeeded Van Deren Coke as head of one of the country’s most active departments of photography. Phillips stepped down from her full time position in 2016.
Peter Galassi, chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, said "I think she is one of the best photography curators that anybody has ever known."
Life and work
Phillips' father was Joseph Sammataro, "an immigrant from Sicily who became a New York architect" and her mother was Nelva Weber, "a farmer's daughter from Illinois who became a well-known landscape architect and author." She grew up in New York's Upper East Side. She received a B.A. in art and art history from Bard College in Upstate New York in 1967, an M.A. from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 1969, and a Ph.D. in art history in 1985 from City University of New York, where she specialised in the history of photography and American and European art from 1849 to 1940. Her Ph.D dissertation was on André Kertész.
She briefly taught history of photography at Mills College in Oakland, CA, and was a curator at the Vassar Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie, NY.
Phillips' earliest major project was the 1985 exhibition André Kertész: Of Paris and New York, organised by the Art Institute of Chicago and shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, in collaboration with the curators of those museums. She is interested in vernacular photography. Her SFMOMA exhibition Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence, "examined mug shots and crime scenes and was the first museum show of its kind." Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870, co-curated with Simon Baker at Tate Modern, examined the voyeuristic aspect of photography; it premiered at Tate Modern in London and toured to SFMOMA and to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
“Sandra S. Phillips” enters the record as american writer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sandra, Phillips and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q30123030. VIAF identifies the subject as 7528271. The Library of Congress control number is n84208946. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1987, 1999 and 2016.
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