Sarah Kenderdine

Bio

Professor Sarah Kenderdine leads a team of software engineers, artists, and curators, at the forefront of interactive and immersive experiences for galleries, libraries, archives and museums. In widely exhibited installation works, she has amalgamated tangible and intangible cultural heritage with new media art practice, especially in the realms of interactive cinema, augmented reality and embodied narrative. Sarah has produced 90 exhibitions and installations for museums worldwide. In 2017, Sarah was appointed professor at the École Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland where she has built the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+), exploring the convergence of imaging technologies, immersive visualisation, digital aesthetics and cultural and scientific (big) data. She as raised nearly CHF12million in competitive grant funding and donations since arriving in Switzerland.

Since 2017, Sarah has taken the first directorship and is lead curator of EPFL Pavilions, a new art/science initiative housed in a seminal Kengo Kumar building. Located at the heart of a vibrant international university and elite engineering school, EPFL Pavilions is an amplifier for art, science and society, a meeting place for all disciplines. Reaching beyond object-oriented curation, EPFL Pavilions blends experimental curatorship and contemporary aesthetics with open science, digital humanism and emerging technologies.

In 2020, she was named in the Museum Influencer List 2020 – The Power 10 by Blooloop and, Switzerland’s Top 100 Digital Shapers by Bilanz in 2020 and 2021. In 2021, Sarah was appointed corresponding fellow of The British Academy. She is a regular keynote speaker worldwide.

Recent exhibitions
  • Cosmos Archaeology: Explorations in Time and Space, EPFL Pavilions, 16 September 2022 – 05 February 2023, visualization of the largest dataset of the universe, space debris and sounds of space
  • Deep Fakes: Art and Its Double, EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne, Switzerland, September 2020 – 02 May 2022, the application of emerging technologies to the world of art and architecture.
  • New Media Art, 5 permanent installations for the Hong Kong Palace Museum, 3 July 2022, five new interactive, algorithmic and animated artworks to be embedded among the series of profound object exhibitions.
  • The Atlas of Maritime Buddhism, Indra and Harry Banga Gallery, CityU, Hong Kong, July – November 2021.
  • Buddhist Maritime Silk Road – New Media Art Exhibition, Fo Guan Shan Monastery Museum, Taiwan, permanent exhibition from 16 May 2021.
Memberships in panels and advisory boards (current)
  • European Research Council: Synergy Evaluation Committee 2022
  • Scientific Board Member of the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) Advisory Board, Swiss National Bank Visitor Centre
  • Scientific Commission, Instituto Svizzero
  • Advisory Board, Fondation Claude Verdan: Musée de la main, UNIL-CHUV
  • Advisory Board Member of the Royal Commission for Al Ula, Saudi Arabia
  • Advisory Board Member of ArtTech Foundation, Switzerland
  • Association Committee, Réseau Romand Science et Cité (RRSC)
Links