Ingrid Sischy

In 2015, Sischy married her longtime partner of over 25 years, Sandra Brant (née Simms).

Sischy died on 24 July 2015 at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center from breast cancer at the age of 63.

In 2013, Sischy was given the "Fashion Scoop of the Year" Award (for her Vanity Fair piece on John Galliano) at the Fashion Media Awards by her friend, photographer Bruce Weber.

In 2008, Sischy resigned from Interview Magazine amidst much press and speculation.

Sischy was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair from 1997 until her death in 2015. She was the international editor of Condé Nast, writing for the Spanish, French, and Italian versions of Vanity Fair, and the German and Russian versions of Vogue.

In 1996, she was named Artistic Director of the inaugural Florence Fashion Biennale, where she created an exhibition that showed work in 20+ museums in the Florence, Italy area. Part of this exhibition was later presented at the Guggenheim Museum Soho.

In 1989, Sischy took over as editor of Interview, a downtown magazine founded by Andy Warhol in 1969. During her tenure at Interview, covers of the magazine became iconic, promoting artists, actors, and fashion icons from the art world.

She left Artforum in 1988 to become a consulting editor at The New Yorker and work on in-depth research on the AIDS virus, which had begun to decimate the downtown artist community. From 1988-96, she worked at The New Yorker, reporting on fashion and art.

She received an honorary PhD in the humanities from the Moore College of Art in 1987.

In 1979, at the age of 27, Sischy was appointed editor-in-chief of Artforum magazine by businessman and publisher Anthony Korner and Amy Baker Sandback. Sischy immediately tapped into the vibrant downtown art scene and created innovative, avant-garde covers and highly stylized content, often written by artists, that created a new standard for art magazines. Over her eight-year editorship, Sischy transformed the once-esoteric Artforum into the so-called "art world bible" it is today. Sischy herself became known as a tastemaker and something of an icon, and was profiled at length by the critic and journalist Janet Malcolm in The New Yorker.

In 1978, Sischy interned at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) under a National Endowment for the Arts curation grant, where she focused on curating photography exhibits, one called "In the Twenties: Portraits From the Photography Department", and another on photographer Ansel Adams. During this time, she was mentored by John Szarkowski. the Director of the Department of Photography at MoMA.

Sischy was a member of an all-female art band called Disband, founded in 1978 by artists and writers. She was featured in the 2011 documentary film !Women Art Revolution, where she discussed her contributions to the feminist movement of female artists in the 1970s.

While in Scotland, Sischy attended George Watson's Ladies College. In Rochester, she graduated from Brighton High School, where she was the president of the senior class. Sischy started college at Sarah Lawrence College during a time of great political unrest in the United States. It was there that she came out as a lesbian. She also took writing classes with Grace Paley. Sischy graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1973.

In 1961, when Sischy was nine years old, the Sischy family left apartheid-era South Africa after the Sharpeville massacre and moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, where Dr. Sischy re-trained as a radiologist. The family had had to leave South Africa because Sischy's mother was in danger of being arrested for her involvement in an activist group, the Black Sash, that non-violently protested apartheid. In 1967, the family moved to Rochester, New York, where Sischy's father became the head of radiation oncology at Highland Hospital.

Ingrid Barbara Sischy (/siː'sʃi/ ) (March 2, 1952 – July 24, 2015) was a South African-born American writer and editor who specialized in covering art, photography, and fashion. Sischy rose to prominence as the editor of Artforum between 1979 and 1988. Her status and power, aided by her connections and friendships with many in the art and fashion communities, was cemented during her tenure as the editor-in-chief of Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine between 1989 and 2008. Until her death in 2015, she and her partner, Sandra Brant, worked together as the international editors of the Italian, Spanish, and German versions of Vanity Fair.