Sandrine Schaefer

Assistant Professor

Contact Sandrine Schaefer

EHFA 133

Spring 2024 Office Hours
Mondays 2:45 - 4:15pm
Tuesdays 1:45 - 3:15pm
*Please email for an appointment.

And though I don’t have the luxury of centuries, I do have reach.” – Alexis Pauline Gumbs from Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

Biography

Sandrine Schaefer is an interdisciplinary artist who primarily works in place-based performance art and interactive installation. Positioning the live encounter as primary and using a site-sensitive approach, Sandrine’s art practice is social and collaborative. Their artwork challenges conventional viewing tendencies by using repetition, long duration, and strategies that reward curious viewers with multisensory elements. Sandrine’s most current research explores everyday encounters in urban wilds between humans and other-than-human animals considered “nuisance species”. Celebrating our interspecies entanglements, Sandrine’s work reimagines ways for humans to be in relationship with their surrounding other-than-human worlds. Sandrine believes it is an artist’s responsibility to uplift the work of others. To bring this belief into action, Sandrine’s work extends into arts organizing, independent curation, writing and teaching. They have co-founded artist-run initiatives and art spaces and their writing on contemporary time-based art has been included in international print and online publications. Sandrine has been teaching art at the university level since 2012, offering courses in performance art, socially-engaged approaches, interdisciplinary art, professional practices, and artistic research methods. Before joining Coastal, Sandrine taught in the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Lesley Art + Design at Lesley University and the College of Arts Media + Design at Northeastern University.

Education

M.F.A., School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2016
B.F.A., School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at Tufts University, 2004

Intersting Facts

Sandrine’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally through the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Kunstgarasjen in Bergen, Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery in Chicago, VIVA! Art Action in Montreal, and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and more. They have received awards through the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Tanne Foundation, the ICA Foster Prize, the Boston Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center. Sandrine is gender non-conforming, a first-generation college graduate, and is an advocate for animal rights.

Teaching Areas

3D and Expanded Practices

Research Areas

Durational performance art, interactive installation, public art, art in the everyday, interspecies entanglements

Website: www.SandrineSchaefer.com