Juan Sanchez earned his BFA from Cooper Union in and his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers State University of New Jersey. He currently teaches painting at Hunter College in New York City. Sanchez combines painting and photography with other media clippings and found objects to confront America's political policies and social practices concerning his parents' homeland of Puerto Rico. Sanchez often specifically addresses Puerto Rico's battle for independence and the numerous obstacles facing disadvantaged Puerto Ricans in America. Sanchez has received many awards for his work, including a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Hispanic Academy of Media Arts and Sciences and the Pollack/Krasner Award. He has worked at Island Press twice: first in 1990 and again in 1997. His 1997 IP work, Sol y Flores para Liora, won a Grand Prize at the XII Bienal de San Juan del Grabado Latinoamericano y Del Caribe in 1998. Other work by Sanchez is included in the collections of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and El Instituto de Cultura Puertoriqquena in San Juan.