Sarah Ciston 

Short bio

Sarah Ciston is an artist-researcher building tools to bring intersectional, critical–creative approaches to machine learning and a PostDoc at IT:U from October 2025. They hold a PhD in Media Arts + Practice from University of Southern California and are the author of A Critical Field Guide for Working with Machine Learning Datasets. They are also the founder of Code Collective: an approachable, interdisciplinary community for co-learning programming. 

Sarah has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies and the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, and they were recently named an AI Newcomer by the German Society for Computing. Their art and research has been featured at Akademie der Künste Berlin, Chaos Communication Camp, the European Commission, Google Season of Docs/p5.js, Mozilla Festival, MU Eindhoven, MUTEK, re:publica, Science Gallery London, Scottish AI Alliance, and elsewhere, with writing in Leonardo Journal and AI and Society, and a book forthcoming from MIT Press.