Sarah Zimmer is an artist with a passion for the role creativity plays STEAM, entrepreneurship and collaborative relationships.
As an artist, she investigates the natural environment and human experience with a variety of media and computational tools. Her work is project based, often including collaboration with scientists and programmers.
Sarah earned her BFA in photography from Arcadia University, where she also studied painting. She spent several years working as a freelance photographer and developing her studio practice, before earning her MFA at The University of Pennsylvania in 2008.
While at Penn, Sarah's work started to include video, sound, and installation. Her time outside of the studio included courses in screenwriting and human perception, to enrich the narrative quality of her work. The photographs and other art objects she created slowly gave way to the creation of media based installations that used the 4th dimension of time.
After a year of working as an artist assistant and studio manager for Philadelphia muralist Meg Saligman, Sarah founded the new media collaborative group Create In Situ, with fellow UPenn alumni Kim Brickley. Their interactive light design for an underpass in Philadelphia was chosen my the Mural Arts Program and was also a semi-finalist for the Knights Art Challenge.
Both her collaborative and independent works explore the perception of place, with a focus sensory stimuli, perception and processing. While she has expanded her practice to incorporate physical computing, Sarah continues to utilize lens based media, to examine our contemporary preoccupation with surveillance and sousveillance.
She currently lives a nomadic lifestyle to facilitate artistic explorations of various environments and cultures, as she settles into a permanent creative practice in Hawaii.