About Soft Labor
Soft Labor is a strategic consultancy that advises organizations, designers, and others in the culture industry.
Soft Labor is a strategic consultancy that advises organizations, designers, and others in the culture industry.
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 any initiative. While we love devising compelling concepts, we also excel at building strong strategies and tactics for their execution.
Founding principal Sarah Hromack-Chan has spent twenty years as a participant-observer of the organizational mind. She has worked with countless writers, editors, technologists, designers, and design studios while devising creative, editorial, and operational strategies around digital media in founding 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 early-stage digital, editorial, and social strategies of publications including Curbed SF (now, New York Magazine) and Art in America; her first website, Forward Retreat (1999-2008) was one in an early cohort of American art blogs. A graduate of the California College of the Arts (MA, visual and critical studies) and the Maryland Institute, College of Art (BFA art and 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.
Soft Labor produces a namesake publication about creative labor: what it is, what it looks like, and how it has and will continue to change. Soft Labor (the publication) concerns itself with ideas, feelings, politics, and social and cultural propositions, but it focuses most closely on how to sharpen these aspects of being a person into functional strategies and tactics for deployment in the working world, where sometimes “being a person” seems like the hardest part of the job.
Masthead:
Writer and Editor in Chief: Sarah Hromack-Chan
Questions and Quotes: Everyone
Editorial Strategist: Eve Batey
Design: Other Means