BIO
A photographer, animator, and graphic designer, Sharon Hoogstraten is best known for her portraits of Potawatomi Indians in regalia and for her Emmy award-winning animated openings for television news programs. She received a BS in Professional Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago where she taught Graphic Communication at UIC as an Adj. Assoc. Professor. A graphic designer for WLS-TV in Chicago, she received an Emmy award for an animated editorial open in 1983. Moving to WTTW-TV, the Chicago PBS station, she received an Emmy for two animations in 1985—a wire-frame computer animation of the city (collaborating with programmers at Skidmore, Owens, and Merrill), and a sunrise to sunset 360 degree time-lapse of the Chicago skyline. In addition to her Emmys for Individual Achievement in Graphic Design, she has won Gold and Silver Broadcast Design Association awards, and a Birmingham Children¹s Film Festival award as the producer of several animated short films. Sharon has served as a judge for the Chicago Book Clinic annual awards and worked on numerous award winning educational and trade books. Major clients have included McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt Brace, Scott Foresman, Contemporary Books, National Geographic and Illinois Institute of Technology.
Closing her commercial photography practice in 2017, Sharon refocused on new projects of particular importance to her. The Green City Farmers Market: A Song of Thanks was published in 2019 and the first edition of Dancing for Our Tribe: Potawatomi Tradition in the New Millennium in 2022.
Hoogstraten spent a decade portraying contemporary Potawatomis in regalia and as an unexpected dividend, discovered her own roots. A Michigan native, she traveled to Chicago for graduate study and then stayed having no clue that she was literally walking in the footsteps of her Potawatomi ancestors. Beginning with Citizen Potawatomi Nation, her home reservation in Shawnee, Oklahoma, she called on all nine nations of the scattered Potawatomi tribe, producing photographic proof that in this new millennium “WE ARE STILL HERE.” Her large-format canvas portraits of Potawatomi Indians have been exhibited in numerous museums and institutions.
She is currently at work on new book initiatives including a second edition of Dancing for Our Tribe, Window on the Square, a campaign for the preservation of Chicago's Boulevards, and Working Vacation.