Clarissa T. Sligh (born August 30, 1939) is an African-American book artist and photographer based in Asheville, North Carolina. At age 15, she was the lead plaintiff in a school desegregation case in Virginia. In 1988, she became a co-founder of Coast-to-Coast: A Women of Color National Artists' Project, which focused on promoting works completed by women of color. Early life and education Sligh was born in Washington, D.C. She grew up in a large working-class family and "went to segregated schools in a predominantly white Virginia county." In 1955, at the age of 15, she was the lead plaintiff in a school desegregation case in Virginia (Thompson v County School Board of Arlington County). Sligh attended the traditionally African-American Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, where she earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1961. In 1972, she received a bachelor's degree in Visual Arts from Howard University in Washington DC, and in 1973, an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1999, she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Visual Arts from Howard University. Career Before working as an artist, Sligh had a job at NASA where she worked in the manned space flight program. In 1987, Sligh was able to leave her day job to focus on working as an artist. Her work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Jewish Museum in New York City, and at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her work has also been displayed at the National African American Museum Project, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the forerunner to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Field of work Sligh considers herself foremost a storyteller. Her photographs and artist books center on politics, family life, questions of identity, and personal experience. Her work also engages more broadly in creative explorations of history, social justice, and transformation. In her work, Sligh combines photographs and other images with text; as she added more text, she moved from creating prints to book works. According to Carla Williams, Sligh's work reflects on our perceptions of normality and our roles in different frameworks such as family, society, gender and ethnic groups. As Williams says, "In school readers from her childhood, Sligh discovered the model from which to confront the realities of her own life." Sligh has created books reflecting