Sala Elise Patterson is a researcher and writer of overlooked stories, especially of the African Diaspora. A former magazine editor, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Kinfolk, Vogue Italia, British Journal of Photography and The New York Times, where she broke the story of Adrienne Fidelin, the first Black model to appear in a major American fashion magazine. Sala co-authored the entry on Fidelin in the Oxford Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biographies and an essay on her in the Musée D’Orsay exhibition catalogue for Le modèle noir de Géricault à Matisse. 

Sala is a serial expatriate (Benin, Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, Tanzania, Tunisia, United Kingdom) and linguist who holds a BA from Columbia University in African-American Literature and an MSc in Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She is a contributor to Harvard Design Magazine where she writes about design and society, and vice chair of the Board of Trustees of The Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of modern art.