Soft Labor

Soft Labor is a strategic consultancy that advises organizations, designers, and the culture industry led by Sarah Hromack-Chan. We work directly and flexibly with all project stakeholders—executive leadership and administrators, curators, artists, writers, designers, technologists, and other producers—in both creative and practical ways to ensure the success of digital, editorial, and operational initiatives. While we love devising compelling concepts, we also excel at building strong strategies and tactics for their execution. Soft Labor produces a namesake publication about creative labor: what it is and how it has and continues to change. Founding principal Sarah Hromack-Chan has spent twenty years as a participant-observer of the organizational mind. She has worked with countless technologists, writers, editors, designers, and design studios both domestically and internationally while devising creative, editorial, and operational strategies around digital media in leadership roles at the Pratt Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Project and Projects (now, Wkshps). Earlier in her career, she shaped the founding strategies of digital publications including SFist (Gothamist Media), Curbed SF (now, New York Magazine) and Art in America. A graduate of the California College of the Arts (MA, visual and critical studies) and the Maryland Institute College of Art (BFA art/theory), she has taught graduate students in New York University’s Steinhardt School and at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her writing about art, design, and technology is published online and in print; it has also been supported by an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She has lectured and critiqued widely. Clients and Collaborators include: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; Yale School of Art with Other Means; Hyundai Artlab with Digital Counsel; The Joselyn Museum with András Szántó LLC; Related Tactics.