Sara Hendren

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Olin College of Engineering. She 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, won a Science in Society Journalism award, and an Honors recognition in the Massachusetts Book Awards. Sign up for her newsletter here.

Sara is a humanist in tech. (You can find a bunch of her design lab projects here.) Her work of 2010-2020 includes collaborative public art, social design, and writing that reframes the human body and technology. You might be interested in:

— a lectern for short stature

— 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

Sara’s work has been exhibited on the White House lawn under the Obama administration, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, The Vitra Design Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, among other venues, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art 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, residencies at Yaddo and the Carey Institute for Global Good, and an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. At Olin, she is also the Principal Investigator on a three-year initiative to bring more arts experiences to engineering students and faculty, supported by the Mellon Foundation.