Sarah Trad

Sarah Trad is a video artist who explores the relationship between subjective and objective emotionality, navigating daily life and relationships while faced with mental illness, and breaking down stereotypes of gender and narrative. Her work also highlights how mental illness and coming from marginalized backgrounds intersects with internal emotional worlds. The living embodiment of the correlation between chronic depression and binge-watching practices, her work appropriates and manipulates found footage from movies, music videos and television. Trad’s work uses recognizable narrative structures to be viewed in and outside the academy of art, as well as comment on the individual’s relationship to pop culture.

After graduating with a B.F.A. in Art Film from Syracuse University, Sarah continued to stay in Syracuse and make several works as a recipient of Syracuse University’s Engagement Fellowship. Sarah also worked as a Curatorial Associate at The Warehouse Gallery and Community Folk Art Center. She has worked under Helen Molesworth at the ICA/Boston, researching how to preserve new media art in the museum’s newly created Private Collection. Sarah is a member of the artist run gallery, Little Berlin, where she has initiated curatorial exchanges with other artist run collectives in New Orleans and Ottawa. She is currently working on creating an A/V technology exchange and rental program between the multiple artist collectives in Philadelphia, as a way to promote the exhibition of media art, as well as offering a space for struggling curators of marginalized backgrounds to curate exhibitions they might not have the resources to otherwise. Sarah is the recipient of the Rutland Vermont Art Center 77Art Artist Residency, the Plyspace Residency Fellowship awarded by the Muncie Council for Arts and Culture, and Carol N. Schmuckler Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film. Sarah’s work has been shown at The Rendezvous With Madness Festival (Toronto, ON), The Warehouse Gallery (Syracuse, NY), Kitchen Table Gallery (Philadelphia, PA) and the Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY). She currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA with her German Shepherd, Vulcan, who she is training to be an emotional support animal.