Sarah Kornfeld is an American author, producer, and cultural strategist whose work explores the intersections of love, trauma, and cultural resilience.

Background:

Raised in New York’s radical theater movement, Sarah grew up in the avant-garde world of her father, Lawrence Kornfeld—founder of The Judson Poets Theater and former managing director of The Living Theater. These formative years shaped her creative instincts, performing with The Bread and Puppet Theater, The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and other experimental ensembles.

At seventeen, she began working in site-specific performance with Dancing in the Streets and Grand Central Dances. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, she studied choreography with Viola Farber, Bill T. Jones, David Gordon, and Elizabeth Streb, while developing early plays influenced by pastiche techniques drawn from David Bowie and Brian Eno. She received additional training at London’s Royal Court Theatre.

In the 1990s, Sarah became part of the pioneering Internet and VR culture in San Francisco, contributing to platforms and institutions like Google Earth, Netflix, The Institute for the Future, UC Berkeley’s Magnus and Beall Centers, the California Academy of Sciences, and The Kitchen’s Art and Technology Network. In 2022, she co-founded Rising Partners (based in Rome and San Francisco) focusing on emerging Web3 programs for cultural brands. Her work bridges art, technology, and social impact, redefining how cultural initiatives engage with new media, languages and thought.

Cultural Producing:

She currently splits her time between New York and London. In 2025 she came full circle to became a strategist for Judson Commons, the Arts and Justice arm of Judson Memorial Church. She supports the mission of the New York artist in residency programs including Black Esthetics as well as Black Trans Liberation Kitchen. She works with the Artistic Director, Rev. Micah Bucey and Managing Director, YooRae Choi as they move more programs into Judson Commons.

She is also a co-producer with Wednesday 66 Productions in London developing strategy, positioning and programmatic leadership for Aguda Returns: From 1830 to The Future. Aguda Returns is a groundbreaking transregional cultural heritage project that traces the hidden history of the Afro-Brazilian Aguda people—formerly enslaved West Africans who gained their freedom and returned to Nigeria between the 1840s and 1890s. This project combines historical research and documentary, and public engagement to restore and share a diasporic legacy that has been erased from global memory.

(For Sarah’s complete producing history visit here)

Writing:

As a writer, Sarah's debut novel What Stella Sees was published in 2018, and was praised,“…Imaginative, eloquent, poetic and profoundly insightful of how injured minds work, the entire book reads with like grace...In a word, inimitable. Gorgeous writing in a story that deserves our empathy and admiration.” Grady Harp, Art and Poetry Reviewer for POETS and ARTISTS magazine. This was followed by The True in 2021, which launched at the Romanian Literary Festival at the National Theater in Bucharest. Rain Taxi stated about the book, “Sarah Kornfeld’s The True is an extraordinary satire of the corrupt economy engulfing the world.” The True was published in English and Romanian.

Her current project, Juno, and the Long Eye of History, delves into themes of assimilation, identity, and transformation, exploring the intertwined legacies of Hungarian Jewish history, equestrian culture, and the shifting tides of modernity in 1900 Budapest. In addition to her novels, Sarah writes essays and articles on the Creative Economy, artists' ethics, and the evolving intersection of art and technology. She is an adjunct professor at San Francisco University, where she has taught Cultural Curation.

Sarah divides her time between New York and London, developing both her writing and her work at the intersection of art and technology.