bio

Sarah Chokyi Bauer is a multidisciplinary artist who works primarily in performance, photography, video, sound and digital media. She is co-founder of Ro~Sa —with Robin Assner—a collaborative effort that produces installations, photography, performance and experimental videos.

Bauer holds a BFA in printmaking from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and an MFA in sculpture from the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 2003 she added experimental and documentary filmmaking to her technical and aesthetic repertoire, co-founding the film company UnderBelly Films, LLC. and is currently directing and producing—with business partner Jen Dietrich—a feature length documentary film titled Not Made in Heaven, on the New York Realist painter Philip Pearlstien.

Bauer trained at a number of respected U.S. and international art institutions, including The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Central St. Martins in London, England. She has exhibited her work internationally and has traveled extensively, visiting countries including Borneo, Israel, Mexico, Micronesia, Tibet, Nepal, Thailand and South Africa. Bauer has studied and practiced Buddhism and Dzogchen (a meditation tradition within Tibetan Buddhism) since 1996. She has spent over a year of her life in retreat, and studies regularly with Buddhist teachers and Lamas born and trained in both the East and the West.

Exhibitions include Souvenirs from the Earth, clogne, Germany, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minnesota, Exit Art in New York City, SPACES gallery in Cleveland, Ohio and SCOPE New York Art Fair with [PAM] The Perpetual Art Machine.

Since moving to Minnesota, Bauer has received many grants and fellowships in support of her work including the 2004 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. She is an Associate Professor of Art and Design at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where she was the Foundations Coordinator from 2000–04 before she was appointed the Digital Arts Area Head.