Sara Schnadt

Sara Schnadt is an artist, UX designer and software systems architect. She has been working since 2004 overseeing and designing for large-scale civic data projects alongside her installation art practice. At NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory she is a Senior Lead Designer in the Human Centered Design Group, working on flagship mission Ground Data Systems. Currently, for the Mars 2020 Mission, she is working on science intent capture tools for rover observations. Previously, on the Europa Clipper Mission, she designed a system architecture for machine learning for science. Before JPL, Sara built the first design team at Planet Labs, an aerospace startup that is imaging the entire earth every day in order to monitor climate change and other planet-scale dynamics in real time. She has also worked at Anaconda, researching and designing solutions for a data visualization authoring tool for scientific big data analytics. Other projects include Census Reporter, a data vis interface and exploration tool to help journalists incorporate census data in their work, and OpenElections, an election data access project.

Sara's art practice is informed by her work in civic technology infrastructure development, which is an ongoing
research resource, and drives her interest in the cultural impacts of technology innovation. Sara’s installation art has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as MCA Chicago, Perform Chinatown, LA, MOCAD Detroit, Free Manifesta, and the Busan Biennial.