Sarah Friend is an artist and software developer from Canada and currently based in Berlin, Germany. She is an alumni in the Berlin Program for Artists, a founder and co-curator of Ender Gallery, an artist residency taking place inside the game Minecraft, and an organiser of Our Networks, a conference on all aspects of the distributed web. Recent solo exhibitions include Off: Endgame, curated by Rhizome, Refraction and Fingerprints at Public Works Administration, New York, USA and Terraforming at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Berlin, Germany.
She is on the advisory board and was formerly the smart contract lead for Circles UBI, a blockchain-based community currency that aims to lead to a more equal distribution of wealth. She was also the technical lead for Culturestake, a project that uses quadratic voting to lead to better decisions about arts funding. She is a co-founder of bitspossessed, a software development consultancy that operates as a coop, and in 2022 was a visiting Professor of blockchain art at The Cooper Union.
She was the recipient of the 30 Under 30 Developers in Canada award and the GDC Scholarship for Women in Games. She has had work commissioned by Furtherfield, London; & NEoN Festival, Dundee; as well as the HEK Basel, Basel; & Unfinished, NYC. She has spoken at Transmediale, Berlin; The New School, New York; and Interaccess, Toronto, amongst others. Her work has been featured in Outland, Motherboard, Spike Art Magazine and Texte zur Kunst.
Previous exhibitions include: BPA:// Exhibition, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Not About Money, Raiden INST, Shenzhen; Peer to Peer, Feral File and the Albright Knox Museum, Online; Continuous Shift, Kristianstands Konsthall, Kristianstand, Sweden; DYOR (Do Your Own Research), Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland; Creation Stories, Gus Fisher Gallery, New Zealand; Worldbuilding, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf; NFTNETART – From Net Art to Art NFT, Panke Gallery & Office Impart, Berlin; The Byzantine General’s Problem, Distant Gallery and Aksioma, Online; Proof of People, Fabric, London, UK (2022). Contingent Systems, Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary; Proof of Stake, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg; Breadcrumbs, Galerie Nagel Draxler, Cologne; Proof of Art, Oökultur, Linz; Salon Solaire, suns.works, Zurich; Panarchist's Dinner, Floating University, Berlin (2021); S'eclispser: Phases of Resilience, ALM|NT2 & HTMelles Festival, Montreal; Crypto_manifold, Chronus Art Center, Shanghai; Extinction Litany, Afloat Assembly, Flensburg; Art of No Likes, Arebyte Gallery, London; Screensaver watching you, Offsite Project, online (2020).