Sarah is currently a photo editor at The New York Times. Previously, Hughes worked at Paris Match Magazine, Getty Images Reportage, The New Yorker Magazine art reviews, and the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian. She is the founder of "The Persona Project" where she leads workshops and consults on projects related to Safe & Sexy, her global portrait and interview series on women, identity, and public space. She explores themes of vulnerability, power, comfort, and attraction. Hughes has exhibited and taught extensively in Sweden and the United States, and has continued the series in Canada, Brazil, South Africa, Swaziland, and Turkey. Sarah Hughes is based in New York.

Safe & Sexy documents women in the public space in two modes; one for comfort, one for attraction. Through portraits, interviews and audio, I explore how social conventions, economic structures, personal history and location shape our visual and psychological landscape. This seemingly simplistic approach invokes a complex dialogue on the layered realities of individuals navigating a terrain of vulnerability, power, comfort, and attraction. The women choose their outfits and a location familiar to them. One persona does not exclude the other- at times interchangeable or the same. The diptych presents a dual ‘first impression’ and highlights that a woman’s appearance and body language function as a barometer for their level of interactivity with those around them. These portraits reference contemporary culture and mainstream media's fascination with self-transformation through "before and after" imagery.