Sonja Langford (b. 1994) is an artist and researcher raised in the American South. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Connecticut and holds a BA in Art History from the University of North Carolina Charlotte.
Her practice encompasses photography, bookmaking, social practice, archival research, and installation, all exploring themes of medical history, gender, and power. Through her research on American gynecology, she investigates the intersection of history and contemporary healthcare disparities, highlighting how past narratives continue to shape present realities. Her work seeks to challenge perceptions of visibility and control within medical and historical contexts, bringing to light the overlooked and the unseen.
Sonja's practice is also informed by the principals of facilitation, drawing from years of experience in leadership education, challenge courses, and outdoor adventure learning to inform how she approaches the studio and the classroom. The values of collaboration, community, reflection, and collective meaning-making shape her artistic methods as much as they shape her pedagogy. Within this ecosystem, research, teaching, and artmaking converge: each becomes a way to question structures of her research of medical and historical power while creating spaces for dialogue, agency, and recognition of what is often overlooked.
Sonja’s work has been exhibited in numerous venues, including the Gadsden Museum of Art (forthcoming), the McColl Center, and GoodYear Arts.
photo taken by Scott Stallings
My work traces the ways history inscribes itself onto bodies, institutions, and language. I work with text, material, and form—not to resolve, but to hold space for what resists erasure. The archive is incomplete. The record is not neutral. The body remembers even when history forgets.
My practice examines the overlooked and unsettling narratives embedded within the archives of American gynecology and the persistence of its legacy. Through installation, bookmaking, and social practice, I investigate how medical systems shape bodily autonomy and care, illuminating the widening gender gap in healthcare, research, and funding. Much of my research is rooted in the American South, a landscape where history is never still, where past and present collapse into one another.
As both an artist and facilitator, I approach this work with an ethic of participation, reflection, and collective meaning-making. My background in leadership development and outdoor education has shaped how I hold space in my practice: listening for what sits underneath, attending to what lingers, and creating conditions for shared inquiry. These principles guide slow, deliberate processes of transcription, excavation, and activation that parallel the work of navigating archives and histories of power.
I return to language as both subject and material. Medical texts, institutional records, and historical accounts reveal as much in their absences as in their claims. Words can be stable or unstable, fixed or breaking apart. I let them unravel, stretch, contradict.