Sara Roberts

The basis for Sara Roberts’ work is in experimental writing forms. She received her MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, in 1988. Her code-driven installations and group interaction works have shown extensively on the West Coast and in Europe.

Throughout the ‘80s and early ‘90s Roberts worked in feature film editing at Zoetrope Studios and at Lucasfilm's Skywalker Ranch. She taught at San Francisco State University, in the Conceptual Design Program. In 1994 she moved to Los Angeles to teach at CalArts in the Composition/New Media Program. She was the founding director of the Integrated Media Program (an interdisciplinary graduate program) at CalArts, 1996-2001, and continues to teach both in that program and in the Experimental Sound Practices Program in the School of Music.

During her sabbatical in ‘01/02 Roberts was a senior research fellow in the Studio of Narrativity and Communication, Interactive Institute, Malmø, Sweden working on her ‘20 to 20 project’—fostering composite identity in group communication. For the same project she received a Rockefeller Foundation Media Fellowship in 2002. Recently she has been using, in workshops, the “earbees”, a set of fifteen simple handheld devices that she and Palle Henckel created for experiments with sound, language, and group dynamics.