Sara Schnadt is a Chicago-based performance/installation artist. Raised on an international commune in Scotland, an 'alternative' context which considered itself as a social experiment outside of conventional culture, she spent formative years understanding herself as an outsider, an observer. Since moving to the United States in 1986, Sara has become fascinated with the unifying rituals and values that are common threads in contemporary western culture, and has made work that frames and resonates with those common threads.

Previous themes in her work include gift-giving, suspension of disbelief, mortality, information systems, social media and collective knowledge. Her development of these themes is informed by life experiences and the values of her formative years (particularly the importance of ritual, integrating one's life philosophy with the tasks of daily life, and seeing collective experience as transformative).

Formally, Sara makes performance and installations that use task, found objects, interactivity, projection, and movement derived from common gestures. Her work creates environments that shift the audience regularly from spectator to participant as the performer constantly moves between pedestrian and more stylized or evocative activity and the viewer negotiates spacial immersion in the work.

Works often take shape as installations and live activities that translate data visualizations of large quantities of socially-resonant information into material, gestural and poetic form.