The UNC community lost one of its students this week after she died while hiking.

According to the Morehead-Cain Foundation, Sally Sasz of the UNC Class of 2021 passed while hiking in Utah on Monday. The 21-year-old was an art history and English major and the recipient of the Morehead-Cain scholarship. Sasz served as an Arts Ambassador for the UNC Arts Everywhere initiative and worked as both an art editor and board member for the undergraduate literary magazine Cellar Door.

“The Morehead-Cain community is heartbroken by Sally’s loss,” reads the post on the foundation’s website. “Our love goes out to her parents, her sisters, her extended family, and her many friends.”

In addition, UNC alumnae Tonya Turner Carroll eulogized Sasz in a post for the Morehead-Cain Foundation. Carroll owns an art gallery where Sasz worked for two summers and compared the rising senior was “a shining star.”

Sally Sasz ’21 (far left) with Tonya Turner Carroll ’89 (second from right) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (Photo via the Morehead-Cain Foundation.)

“Sally absorbed the world with every element of her being,” wrote Carroll. “She noticed everything, and her inquisitiveness fueled her determination to uncover every aspect of her interests. When she arrived in Santa Fe to work with us the first summer, it was clear there was something different and brilliant and special about her. It wasn’t just her optimistic, self-assured personality; it was clear she was following a path she was paving with her passions as she moved through her life. Sally saw how art could change the world, and in her lifetime, she actually did that.”

To read the full posts from the Morehead-Cain Foundation about Sasz’s life and contributions to the UNC community, visit its website.

Photo via the Morehead-Cain Foundation.

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