BIO
Sarah Rosalena is a Los Angeles–based artist and weaver whose work intervenes between craft and digital technology. Throughout her career, she has built a reputation for breaking boundaries through traditional handicraft practices rooted in Indigenous cosmologies, shaped by the convergence of machine processes and her hand. Rooted in weaving passed down to her in the Wixárika tradition, her research engages the medium’s inherent dualities and structural logics—0s and 1s, warp and weft, over and under—to dissolve hierarchies between the physical and the digital. 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 a 3D ceramic printer, she creates generative forms that echo the patterns of weaving and basketry, later reformed by hand. Working with software, she handcrafts beadwork–pixel per bead–whose surface mimics and disrupts the computer screen.
Renowned for her groundbreaking work in digital Jacquard weaving, machine learning, and 3D-printed ceramics, she continues to expand the possibilities of computational craft. She employs emerging technologies to collapse boundaries between high and low tech, human and nonhuman, ancient and futuristic, tradition and progress—unsettling power structures shaped by colonialism. Her recent survey exhibition, 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 cosmos, 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, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, and was featured in six exhibitions for Getty PST: Art Science Collide. 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.
Renowned for her groundbreaking work in digital Jacquard weaving, machine learning, and 3D-printed ceramics, she continues to expand the possibilities of computational craft. She employs emerging technologies to collapse boundaries between high and low tech, human and nonhuman, ancient and futuristic, tradition and progress—unsettling power structures shaped by colonialism. Her recent survey exhibition, 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 cosmos, 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, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, and was featured in six exhibitions for Getty PST: Art Science Collide. 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.