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Saundra Sturdevant

Documentary Photograph and Historian
sandysturdevant@gmail.com

 

Born in rural Missouri and living with her great-grandmother Martha Shields the first five years of her life, Saundra began first grade in the proverbial but hardly adequate one-room school house. It was uphill from there with the first two degrees from Kansas University, Lawrence, and the PhD in Modern Chinese History, University of Chicago. Completing the post-doc at the Center for Chinese Studies, University of California Berkeley, and publishing the dissertation at Harvard, Saundra lived in Beijing 1981 –1982 and worked for the Foreign Languages Press, a work unit of the Chinese State. It was during the time in China that she began to photograph professionally while making a two-month hard-sleeper (ying-wo) train trip solo throughout much of China.  Since that time she has worked as a documentary photographer in Asia and in Central and North America, written on a number of topics, published and exhibited in galleries and non-traditional venues.

Marginal Rural Missouri origins, coming of age and an activist during the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam Era informed Saundra’s consciousness of community and politics. The formal study of Modern Chinese History, from the Opium War of 1840 to the present, together with the feminist movement broadened this consciousness and developed a gender perspective that has defined her choice of subject matter.

Saundra currently lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills where it is marvelously quiet and she organically grows most of her food. 2009 finds her working on a memoir with images of the time in Beijing, titled “To China and Back.”