Sarah Friend

Sarah Friend is a Canadian artist, researcher, and software developer based in Berlin. Working at the intersection of contemporary art and software development, her practice explores games, economics, and the self through emerging technologies, examining how digital systems reshape identity, ownership, value, and collective experience. Through participatory works spanning installation, software, decentralized technologies, machine learning, and video games, she investigates the emotional and political dimensions of networked life, questioning the infrastructures and systems that govern increasingly online societies.

As an artist, she has exhibited and collaborated with institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centre Pompidou Metz, SculptureCenter, New York, Kunsthaus Zürich, HEK Basel, Haus der Kunst, Munich, ArtScience Museum, Singapore, Somerset House, London, Rhizome, New York, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. As a researcher, she was a Creative Resident at IDEO in 2024, exploring digital pets, and a Core Researcher at the Protocol Institute in 2023, where she investigated the death of digital systems, from social media platforms to MMORPGs and decentralized protocols. She has written for Texte zur Kunst, Spike Art Magazine, Outland, and CoinDesk, and has taught internationally, including as a visiting professor at The Cooper Union in New York.

Friend is the founder and co-curator of Ender Gallery, an artist residency and exhibition space within Minecraft that operated in partnership with the MacKenzie Art Gallery from 2021 to 2022, and is an alumna of the Berlin Program for Artists. Alongside her artistic practice, she has worked extensively in software engineering and technical strategy, contributing to projects including Consensys, Circles UBI, and Culturestake, where she has focused on blockchain infrastructure, decentralized governance, and digital public goods.