Dr. Sarah Marusek is a native New Yorker who writes and draws about the monsters inside all of us
Dr. Sarah Marusek has lived for over five decades with a terrifying monster inside of her body, mind and soul that nobody on the outside has ever dared to acknowledge, a lack of recognition that has only made the monster crueler and stronger as time passes. The work published on this website will finally give voice to this inner monstrosity.
In the past, this monster made it impossible for Marusek to actualise her identity in art or writing, despite her desires, so she graduated instead with a BA in Art History and Literature from Goldsmiths, University of London, subsequently helping to launch a luxury photographic art imprint with the publishers of Dazed and Confused magazine in London. She then migrated to New York City to start SMPR, a boutique public relations agency working with music and arts photographers, galleries, publishers and even a Hollywood actor. However, working with celebrities only made her hidden monster more anxious, more terrifying.
Losing faith over her people’s response to the attacks on 9/11, Marusek then pursued an MA in International Affairs from the New School in NYC and a PhD in Social Science from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, NY. She would go on to spend more than two and a half years in Lebanon researching Islamic activism, also conducting related field research in New York, South Africa, Iran, and Senegal. She was seeking to understand, informed by her own painful history, why society is systematically biased against certain types of humans for reasons not of their own making.
Marusek deeply wrestled with these spiritual and philosophical enquiries in the resulting book Faith and Resistance: The Politics of Love and War in Lebanon (London: Pluto Press, 2018). She has also worked as a researcher and editor for Public Interest Investigations – Spinwatch, co-authoring a series of reports on the overlapping funders of right-wing Zionism and Islamophobia.
Dr. Sarah Marusek 