Sarah Thornton is an investigative writer who uses a range of qualitative research methods to explore high and popular culture. She is a Contributing Editor at the Financial Times’ weekend HTSI magazine and the author of four influential books. A Canadian who went to the UK on a prestigious Commonwealth Scholarship, Thornton was once hailed as “Britain's hippest academic.” Now based in San Francisco, Thornton is better known as the “Jane Goodall of the art world.”

Thornton's most recent book, Tits Up: The Top Half of Women’s Liberation (2024), explores the universal truths of mammary glands alongside their significance in different locations — a strip club, a human milk bank, a plastic surgeon's operating room, a bra design studio, and a neo-pagan spiritual retreat. Many American women dismiss their breasts as "dumb boobs," a fact that Thornton laments, because this body part is a key symbol of womanhood. Their status affects women's social standing and political power. As long as breasts are disparaged as shameful and profane, women will remain the "second sex."

Tits Up received widespread critical acclaim. "Thornton has a history of being prescient,” said Mieke Marple in ZYZZYVA. "Owners and admirers will not look at breasts in the same way again," declared The Economist. Lauren Michele Jackson commended Thornton’s mission "to set these organs free with the goal of gaining a greater understanding of and appreciation for the women to which they are attached” in a long review in The New Yorker. While The Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt from chapter 3 as a “Saturday Essay,” the New York Times declared that Thornton’s "impassioned polemic makes a convincing case that the derogatory way Western culture views tits helps perpetuate the patriarchy.” 

Thornton’s international bestseller Seven Days in the Art World (2008) is now available in 22 languages. Its witty nonfiction narratives reveal the inner workings of the institutions that shape an artist’s place in art history. Explaining the insider nuances of everything from auctions and art fairs to art prizes, biennials, artist crits, and studios, Seven Days has become the essential primer for anyone interested in contemporary art or its business. 

Its sequel, 33 Artists in 3 Acts (2014), examines how successful artists play their game. Drawing on remarkable behind-the-scenes access, the book scrutinizes how artists maintain their confidence and creativity and build a consensus of belief around their work. Divided into three acts titled Politics, Kinship, and Craft, the book is both anthropological and art historical. It features frank, in-real-life, face-to-face interactions with internationally recognized artists such as Ai Weiwei, Maurizio Cattelan, Cindy Sherman, Yayoi Kusama, and Rashid Johnson.

Thornton’s first book, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, is based on her PhD thesis. It charts the hierarchies of coolness through a case study of the British dance club and rave scenes. The first part of the book offers a definitive history of the shift from live to recorded music for public dancing, explaining the temporal, spatial, and status issues surrounding this previously unanalyzed technological evolution. Drawing on the insights of Chicago School sociologists such as Howard Becker and French scholars of taste like Pierre Bourdieu, Club Cultures marks the beginning of Thornton’s longstanding obsession with the body and issues of credibility, authenticity, and cultural worth.

A skilled interviewer and engaging speaker, Thornton has interviewed thousands of people and given hundreds of public talks around the world. She has contributed to NPR, Netflix, MTV, ZDF, and BBC radio and TV, among others.