Sara Hendren is a writer, filmmaker, design researcher, and cultural producer. She is Associate Professor of Art + Design, with an additional appointment at the School of Architecture, at Northeastern University. Sign up for her newsletter here, or for a weekly digest of all her online writing here. A condensed bio is at the bottom of this page.
Sara’s work has been exhibited on the White House lawn under the Obama administration, at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, The Vitra Design Museum, and the Seoul Museum of Art, among other venues, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Cooper Hewitt Museum. She has been a National Fellow at the New America think tank, and her work has been supported by an NEH Public Scholar grant, the Graham Foundation, residencies at Yaddo and the Carey Institute for Global Good, and an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s the New York Times, Wired, Art in America, and other publications.
Sara is the author of What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, published by Riverhead/Penguin Random House. It was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by NPR and won the 2021 Science in Society Journalism book prize. Sara’s work of 2010-2020 includes collaborative public art, social design, and writing that reframes the human body and technology. You might be interested in:
— my first short documentary film Simple Machine, showing this year at the Independent Film Festival Boston, Sheffield Shorts Festival, Atlanta Docufest, West Chester Film Festival, and others TBA.
— a ramp for wheelchair dancing
— a navigational cane that plays music
— a street art effort that became the Accessible Icon Project
— a digital archive of low-tech prosthetics called Engineering at Home
— a long-running obsession with the inclined plane
— a six-part podcast Sara produced and hosted about ethics in engineering education, and relatedly:
— a four-year effort to bring more arts and humanities to higher-ed STEM called Sketch Model: artists’ residencies, student fellowships, and seed funds for faculty and staff.
Starting in 2023, after nine years at Olin College of Engineering, Sara will join the CAMD faculty at Northeastern University, where she’ll pursue an expanded research program on the material culture of the assisted body over the life span: birth, death, and acute conditions of vulnerability. She is also a fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Ethics and the Common Good and a Newbigin Fellow with the Carver Project.
Short bio:
Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Northeastern University. Her book What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World explores the places where disability shows up in design at all scales: assistive technology, furniture, architecture, urban planning, and more. It was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR and won the 2021 Science in Society Journalism book prize. Her art and design works have been exhibited on the White House lawn under the Obama presidency, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Vitra Museum, and many others, and her work is held in the permanent collections at MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt. Her first short documentary film Simple Machine will play at festivals in the US and abroad throughout 2025. She has been an NEH Public Scholar and a fellow at New America, and her commentary and criticism have been published in Harper’s, Art in America, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere.
