Using a site-sensitive approach, the work of Sandrine Schaefer offers opportunities to gather and proposes ways to share time not accessible elsewhere in life. Positioning the live encounter as primary, Sandrine’s interdisciplinary art practice is social and collaborative. Their work most often presents as performance art installations that challenge conventional viewing tendencies by using repetition, long duration, and strategies that reward curious viewers with multisensory elements. Their current research explores everyday encounters in urban wilds between humans and other-than-human animals designated as “nuisance species”. Celebrating our interspecies entanglements, this work reimagines ways for humans to be in relationship with their surrounding larger-than-human worlds in these shared spaces. 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. 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’s work extends into arts organizing, independent curation, writing and teaching. They have co-founded a number of artist-run initiatives and art spaces including The Present Tense Live Art Initiative + Archive Project, The Contaminate International Performance Art Festival, and the award winning gallery, MEME in Cambridge, MA. Sandrine was a member of the experimental artist group and presenting organization, Mobius. Independently and through their work with The Present Tense, MEME, and Mobius, Sandrine has supported hundreds of artists at various stages in their careers who utilize live action in their work. Sandrine’s writing on contemporary time-based art has been included in international print and online publications, and they serve on the Artists Advisory Council at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. 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. They have 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. In January 2022, Sandrine joins the Department of Visual Arts at Coastal Carolina University as an Assistant Professor in 3D and Expanded Practices.
