Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Olin College of Engineering. She is author of “What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World” (2020), which was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by National Public Radio and won the Science in Society Journalism Award from the National Association of Science Writers. Her recent work includes a lectern for short stature, a ramp for wheelchair dancing, a navigational cane that plays music, a street art effort that became the Accessible Icon Project, and a digital archive of low-tech prosthetics called Engineering at Home.

Hendren’s work has been exhibited on the White House lawn, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, the Vitra Design Museum in Rhein, the Seoul Museum of Art, among other venues, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. She has been a National Fellow at the New America think tank, and her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and residencies at Yaddo and the Carey Institute for Global Good.

At Olin, she was principal investigator on an initiative supported by the Mellon Foundation to bring more arts experiences to engineering students and faculty.