Stephanie Sadre-Orafai is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research explores emerging forms of expertise, discourses of realness, and the intersection of race, language, and visual practices in aesthetic industries. Using ethnographic methods, she analyzes how experts come to know, name, and represent people as types, tracing the relationship between these forms of expertise and how US publics see and imagine difference and inequality. Her current research probes the porous boundary between human and non-human types (including fashion models, typefaces, and natural history specimens) to better understand the mutually vivifying and dehumanizing potential of becoming a type and the political stakes and unexpected possibilities of objectification.

Throughout her career she has pursued interdisciplinary and collaborative projects that blend research and creative practice, resulting in public-facing video, curatorial, and experimental print design work. As the 2023–26 Taft Professor of Social Justice she will extend and broaden this collaborative, editorially- and design-based work, developing new creative, applied, analytic, and socially driven projects that highlight the political stakes of visual and cultural forms of knowledge production. She will reshape and reimagine her own research on experts and types for new audiences through public forms of writing and making, and create opportunities for other scholars, students, and activists through programming as a member of the Taft Director’s Planning Committee.

She co-founded and co-directs the Critical Visions program, a joint effort between faculty in the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and College of Arts and Sciences, which she established with Jordan Tate in 2011. The program is aimed at teaching students how to effectively combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practice. She co-edits CVSN, the experimental publication of student work from the program. Themes have included "space" (2013), "the future" (2015), "color" (2016), "surface" (2018), "identity" (2020), "land/water" (2022), and "subject/object" (2023). You can read more about the program here: https://www.criticalvisions.org/