Sara Hendren, MDes.
Associate Professor of Arts, Humanities and Design - On Leave Fall 2021, Spring 2022
Milas Hall Library (Lower Level)
On Leave
Education
MDes. (with distinction), Art, Design, and the Public Domain, Harvard Graduate School of DesignM.A., European History, University of California, Los Angeles
B.A., Studio Art, Wheaton College
Research
Adaptive and Assistive TechnologiesProsthetics
Accessible Architecture
Biopolitics
Disability Studies
Social Design and Public Art Practices
Art-engineering hybrids
Awards
Lincoln City FellowshipFulbright Scholar
Biography
Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher and writer. Her work includes social design projects and mixed media collaborations that engage technology and the adaptive human body. Combining disability studies and critical design, her practice is a restless mix of engineering and the arts in pursuit of sharper questions about human capacity, worth, and interdependence. Her work has been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Vitra Design Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, and others and is held in the permanent collections at MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt Museum. Sara has been an Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fellow at the New America think tank and a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good; she has received an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Public Scholar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is at work on her first book, on the unexpected places where disability is at the heart of design, forthcoming from Riverhead/Penguin Random House. At Olin, she is also Principal Investigator for Sketch Model, a three-year initiative to bring more arts experiences to campus.
Personal Website