Sarah Cook is a curator, writer and researcher based in Scotland. She is Professor of Museum Studies in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow. From 2023 she is a guest professor in Art and AI with UmArts at University of Umeå as part of the WASP-HS programme.
Cooke is editor of 24/7: A Wake-up Call For Our Non-stop World (Somerset House, 2019) and INFORMATION (Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2016) and co-author (with Beryl Graham) of Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (MIT Press, 2010; Chinese edition 2016).
Cook has curated and co-curated over 50 international exhibitions of contemporary art, new media art and digital art for museums, galleries and festivals including Somerset House, BALTIC, Eyebeam, V2_, The Banff Centre, AV Festival, AND Festival, Transitio Festival, Edith Russ Haus, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and for online platforms including Xcult, Add-art, SAW Video, and Bielefelder Kunstverein.
From 2013 to 2020, Sarah was one of the curators behind Scotland’s only digital arts festival NEoN Digital Arts and was founder/curator of LifeSpace Science Art Research Gallery in the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee (both as part of her role as Dundee Fellow at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, 2013-2018). At LifeSpace she curated 16 exhibitions including newly commissioned work from artists Mat Fleming, Heather Dewey Hagborg and Philip Andrew Lewis, Andy Lomas, Daksha Patel, the Center for Postnatural History, Helen and Kate Storey, Mary Tsang, Thomson & Craighead and others.
In 2021-2022 Sarah was a senior academic research fellow at TATE as part of the Mellon-funded project Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum. Together with Beryl Graham, Sarah co-founded CRUMB, the longstanding online resource and network for curators of new media art, hosting workshops and courses worldwide. She holds a Masters degree from CCS at Bard, and a PhD from the University of Sunderland (2004) where she was employed until 2013, undertaking research, supervising PhD students and developing and teaching on the MA Curating course. As part of her research funded by the AHRC, Sarah worked as adjunct curator of new media at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art until 2006, and in 2008 was the inaugural curatorial fellow at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York.
Having grown up in Canada, Sarah has held a longstanding association with The Banff Center where she has worked as a guest curator and researcher in residence for the Walter Phillips Gallery, the International Curatorial Institute and what was the Banff New Media Institute, developing exhibitions, summits, residencies and publications. She co-edited with Sara Diamond Euphoria & Dystopia: The Banff New Media Institute Dialogues (Banff Centre Press, 2011).
Sarah founded and chaired the annual ‘mini-symposium’ at NEoN Festival and in 2019 co-chaired Re@ct: Social Change, Art and Technology. In 2011 she co-chaired Rewire, the Fourth International Conference on the histories of media art, science and technology with FACT in Liverpool. She was a founding member of the advisory board of the Journal of Curatorial Studies.