Sarah Edmands Martin is a designer and researcher whose work takes place at the intersection of visual communication design, critical fabulation, and media aesthetics. Expanding design’s role beyond the commercially driven motivations of the twentieth century, she adopts a speculative approach that reimagines the ways social and civic systems distribute and exercise power through our networked contexts. Originally from the Washington D.C. area, she is now located in the American Midwest where her work responds to site-specific and archival materials, rendering the delightful and the unsettling more visible in order to emphasize how social fictions of identity, power, and oppression proliferate. A constellation of critical theories inform her work, including phenomenology, media theory, narratology, and queer and feminist theory.

Before joining the design faculty at the University of Notre Dame, she was the head of the Graphic Design program at Indiana University. A 2024 Fulbright Scholar, a 2023 Design Writing Fellow at Chicago's Writing Space, a 2021–22 Research Fellow at the Institute for Digital Arts + Humanities, a 2020 Design Incubation Fellow, and a 2019–21 Faculty Affiliate with the Center for Rural Engagement, she is also the author of two chapters in Ethics in Design and Communication: New Critical Perspectives (Bloomsbury 2020) as well as a chapter in Digital Transformation in Design: Processes and Practices (transcript Press 2024). Her design work has been recognized and published by PRINT, Graphis, the Paris Design Awards, London International Creative, and the Creative Communication Awards.

She has two other degrees in English Literature and Painting from the University of Maryland. She has taught design at Indiana University, University of Notre Dame, and Missouri University of Science & Technology, and continues to balance an active studio practice with both research and pedagogy. Her portfolio of clients includes Citibank, AMC’s the Walking Dead, the Snite Museum of Art, Whirlpool, Herman Miller, and Cook Medical (to name a few).

Sarah loves to make and collect .gifs, may at any given moment be caught humming the main theme song from Jurassic Park, and in another life would have been a taxidermist.

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Photography by Myriam Nicodemus.