BIO
Sarah Rosalena (Wixárika) is an artist and weaver known for working between traditional handicraft traditions and digital technology. Throughout her career, Rosalena has built a reputation for breaking boundaries through her hybrid forms rooted in Indigenous cosmologies, transformed through machines and her hand. Rooted in weaving, her research draws on its inherent dualities—warp and weft, over and under—structures that mirror the binary logic of code. By materializing this shared language in her woven textiles and baskets, she exposes and questions the technological frameworks underneath. She handweaves from her digital Jacquard loom to her mother’s bead loom, mixing hand-dyed natural colors, including cochineal and indigo, with a synthetic, pixelated palette to produce unbordered textiles. Working with her 3D ceramic printer to imitate coil pot techniques, she creates generative forms that repeat the patterns of weaving and basketry. Working with image software, she handcrafts beadwork–pixel per bead–whose surface mimics and disrupts the computer screen.
She employs advanced technologies to collapse boundaries between high and low tech, human and nonhuman, ancient and futuristic, tradition and progress—challenging power structures shaped by colonialism. Renowned for her groundbreaking work in digital weaving and 3D-printed ceramics, she continues to expand the possibilities of computational craft. Her recent mid-career survey, In All Directions, explored the geopolitical impacts of climate change, artificial intelligence, and extractive industries, envisioning futures outside these systems while evoking the expansiveness of land and sky and reorienting us toward the infinite.
She is Associate Professor of Art at UC Santa Barbara in Computational Craft and Haptic Media. She has received the United States Artists Award, Creative Capital Award, the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant, the Artadia Award, the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo, the International Society for Art, Sciences, and Technology, and the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Art Prize. She has had solo museum exhibitions with LACMA, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. Her work is in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.
She employs advanced technologies to collapse boundaries between high and low tech, human and nonhuman, ancient and futuristic, tradition and progress—challenging power structures shaped by colonialism. Renowned for her groundbreaking work in digital weaving and 3D-printed ceramics, she continues to expand the possibilities of computational craft. Her recent mid-career survey, In All Directions, explored the geopolitical impacts of climate change, artificial intelligence, and extractive industries, envisioning futures outside these systems while evoking the expansiveness of land and sky and reorienting us toward the infinite.
She is Associate Professor of Art at UC Santa Barbara in Computational Craft and Haptic Media. She has received the United States Artists Award, Creative Capital Award, the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant, the Artadia Award, the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo, the International Society for Art, Sciences, and Technology, and the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Art Prize. She has had solo museum exhibitions with LACMA, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. Her work is in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.