About Sahar

Sahar Sajadieh is a digital performance/media artivist (artist+activist) and theorist, interaction designer, computer scientist, and poet, born and raised in Iran. She is a  Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow (as part of the The UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program) at UC San Diego Department of Visual Arts with a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Sahar is also a current Open Documentary Lab fellow at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She graduated with a dual BSc–BA degree in Computer Science and Theater from the University of British Columbia and received her Master’s Degree from the Performance Studies Department at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts. She was a recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Postdoctoral Fellowship at Vanderbilt University.

Sahar’s research lies at the intersection of computational arts, artificial intelligence, social justice-oriented design, and performance/media theory. She is interested in the creative and critical applications of natural language processing, machine learning, extended reality, and robotics as means of storytelling, poetic expression, and social intervention. For Sahar, art practice is a form of activism, a way to challenge the public’s comfort zone and provoke dialogues about difficult, unspoken issues in society. Her research focuses on making interactive technologies and artificial intelligence more alive and their societal applications more ethical.

As a theater artist, she has written, directed, performed, and worked as a dramaturge in several theatrical performances in New York, Vancouver, and Santa Barbara.