Sarah Huny Young
Sarah Huny Young has had a lot of professional highs in her 38 years. Originally from Denver, she was raised in New York City and at a young age started coding and creating web designs.
Her designs were ornate, provocative and colorful. She also quickly realized that in a space dominated by white men, it was going to be extra hard as a black woman to showcase her work and increase visibility.
“To this day there are still white men in tech and digital media who say they don’t know where to find people of color in this industry, but we’re very visible and very easy to find. There are women of color in the top tiers of Google, Slack, Twitter, Facebook, Vox, Netflix, the list goes on,” she said.
Her career took off when she became the first interactive art director at VIBE Magazine, a publication she revered. She spent the next four years after VIBE as senior frontend developer at Viacom/ BET. Ms. Young also won a Soul Train Award for “Best Soul Site,” when she co-owned the music blog SoulBounce. After moving from NYC to Pittsburgh in 2014, she headed up the redesign of her cousin Damon Young’s popular Very Smart Brothas site, before becoming creative director of 1839 magazine.
“My cousin and I work really well together and we’ve been doing so since 2003 or so, when I built him his very first blog. I’m proud of everything he’s accomplished,” she added.
But realizing that she had to actualize her own passions, she applied and received the Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh grant in 2016 to fund the first quarter of her ongoing documentary and portrait series: “AMERICAN WOMAN.” The series “is about black women in America. It’s about reframing the face most people picture, and the characteristics they assemble when they hear the term ‘American woman,’ ” she said. “I was born a black girl in America, where I was taught from a very young age that beauty and worth looks like a white, blonde, blue-eyed woman.”
Her goal is to center black American women because “we have a complex and oft-times misunderstood relationship with this country and the patriotism often demanded of Americans, and we aren’t frequently extended a chance to explain those nuanced emotions and perspectives.”
Ms. Young hopes to start a conversation through this project around race, religion and gender. And not surprisingly, she recently was named as one of the most influential African-Americans on The Root 100 list, the online national magazine of black culture. “I get to say I was on a list with Ava DuVernay and Beyonce,” she said, smiling. `detractors. “We’ve had a couple of people who say they are going to come and boycott, or come to my house because they think we are pushing a gay agenda,” Mr. King said. But for the most part, reception has been positive.