Sarah Rosalena

Sarah Rosalena (b. 1982, Wixárika) is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist and weaver working between craft and technology. Her practice spans hybrid textiles, ceramics, and basketry rooted in Indigenous cosmologies, made using both her hands and digital tools. She handweaves from her digital jacquard loom to her mother's bead loom, mixing hand-dyed natural colors and materials, including cochineal and pine needles, with a synthetic, pixelated palette to create borderless textiles marked by her signature fray. She uses a 3D ceramic printer to generate woven clay forms that she later manipulates, distorts, and reweaves by hand, and, working with software, she handcrafts beadwork, pixel per bead, whose surface mimics and disrupts the computer screen. Through digital jacquard weaving and 3D-printed ceramics she expands the possibilities of computational craft, collapsing boundaries between high and low tech, human and nonhuman, ancient and futuristic, tradition and progress, and unsettling power structures shaped by colonialism.

Her exhibition layer by layer at Make Room, Los Angeles (2026), presented handwoven works that treat weaving as a form of ecological mapping, transforming topographic references and satellite imagery into layered woven structures. It coincided with her monumental textile commission for the new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Rosalena is Associate Professor of Computational Craft and Haptic Media in the Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara. Her work has been recognized with the United States Artists Award (2025), the Artadia Award (2023), the Creative Capital Award (2022), the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant (2019), and the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo, the International Society for Art, Sciences, and Technology (2018). She has had solo museum exhibitions at LACMA, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, and took part in six exhibitions in the recent Getty Pacific Standard Time. Her work is held in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.