bio

Sarah Chokyi Bauer is a multidisciplinary artist who works primarily in performance, photography, video, sound and digital media. Experimenting with new media is in her genes, as Benjamin Bauer, her Russian-American grandfather, was an engineer and inventor, pioneering sound technologies including LP and quadraphonic sound for stereos. Born in Connecticut and raised Jewish, she was exposed to many emerging technologies as a child and often hammed it up in front of her father’s and grandfather’s photographic and video cameras.

She holds a BFA in printmaking from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and an MFA in sculpture from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Bauer recently added experimental and documentary filmmaking to her technical and aesthetic repertoire, co-founding the film company UnderBelly Films, LLC. She is producing an experimental video with collaborative partner, artist Robin Assner and is currently directing and producing—with business partner Jen Dietrich—a feature length documentary film titled Naked Strangers on The Wall: Philip Pearlstein, Father of New Realism, on the New York Realist painter.

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 Tibet, Nepal, Thailand, South Africa and Israel. Bauer has studied and practiced Buddhism and Dzogchen (a meditation tradition within Tibetan Buddhism) since 1996. She spends at least one month each year in retreat, and studies regularly with Buddhist teachers and Lamas born and trained in both the East and the West.

Currently in the emerging stage of her artistic career, she is pursuing projects, grants and exhibitions nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitioins include 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 which is/was on March 10–13, 2006.

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 Assistant 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 New Media Head.