Sarah Hulsey is a visual artist whose work draws upon on her background in linguistics, which she studied under Noam Chomsky at MIT. She was first attracted to the field because of the surprising, apparently contradictory fact that language is incredibly complex and yet universal throughout humankind. Though languages appear to vary greatly, they have deep commonalities, and this underlying “universal grammar” represents a rich, subconscious knowledge that we all possess, with little awareness of its inner workings.

Hulsey was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. Her interest in art was awakened by an undergraduate job in the Study Room for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Fogg Art Museum. Her pursuit of art deepened over the next decade, parallel to her studies in linguistics, first at Harvard, and later in graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As she learned more about the depth and complexity of language, she became drawn to the possibility of representing its elegant structures through visual art. In 2011, she left a faculty position in linguistics in order to pursue a full-time career as an artist.

She was awarded the 2016 Walter Feldman Fellowship for Emerging Artists in New England and a 2020 Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in Drawing and Printmaking.  She now runs a studio in Somerville, Massachusetts and teaches as a Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island.