Sarah Leen

Sarah Leen (USA) is an American photographer, visual editor, educator and photobook editor whose career has been closely connected with National Geographic for more than four decades. After studying fine art and art history, she discovered photojournalism as a way to explore the world, meet people and tell stories through images. In 1979, she became the first woman to win College Photographer of the Year, earning an internship at National Geographic that began a lifelong relationship with the magazine.

Sarah spent more than two decades working as a freelance photographer, documenting people, cultures and landscapes from the ancient cities of Mali and volcanic regions of Mexico to the frozen reaches of Siberia. Her work appeared in 16 National Geographic stories and on five magazine covers, receiving recognition from World Press Photo and Pictures of the Year International. Her years in the field taught her that photographers must be curious, adaptable and willing to solve problems when reality refuses to follow the plan.

While teaching photography workshops, Sarah discovered how much she enjoyed helping other photographers understand and shape their work. She joined National Geographic as a Senior Photo Editor in 2004 and became the magazine’s first female Director of Photography in 2013. Drawing on her own experience behind the camera, she approached editing as a deeply collaborative process — looking beyond individual photographs to find the emotional centre of a story and helping photographers understand the visual language already present in their images.

Since leaving National Geographic in 2019, Sarah has focused on photobooks, independent visual projects, teaching and mentorship. As a co-founder of the Visual Thinking Collective, she works with photographers, editors and curators to shape complex bodies of work into meaningful visual narratives. Based in Maine, she remains a passionate advocate for the physical photobook and the unique experience created through image sequence, design, paper and the turning of a page.