Professor Sarah Kenderdine researches at the forefront of interactive and immersive experiences for museums and galleries. In widely exhibited installation works, she has amalgamated cultural heritage with new media art practice, especially in the realms of interactive cinema, augmented reality and embodied narrative. In 2013, she received the International Council of Museums Award (Australia), Australian Arts in Asia Innovation Award, Tartessos Prize (Arqueológica) and the Digital Heritage International Congress & IMéRA Foundation (Aix-Marseille University) Fellowship. Recent books include Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: a critical discourse (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), and PLACE-Hampi: Inhabiting the Panoramic Imaginary of Vijayanagara (Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2013). In 2014, she will complete a co-authored monograph for MIT Press with Dr. Fiona Cameron (UWS) “Theorizing digital cultural heritage for a complex, turbulent and entangled world”. Before joining NIEA, Kenderdine was Director of Research at the Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment (ALiVE), City University of Hong Kong. She continues an ongoing appointment with Museum Victoria.

At NIEA, Sarah will focus on theoretical innovation in GLAMs sector, proposing a reformulation of Cartesian principles to define new ontologies that are more. appropriate for a mobile, digital and interconnected world. This theoretical work together with Dr. Cameron and the Institute for Culture and Society, will be co-located with a research practice building embodied interactive systems and engaging in the visualisation of large-scale heterogeneous cultural materials for three communities: researchers (digital humanities), diverse public audiences (GLAMs sector) and students/teachers (new pedagogies through immersive teaching and learning). This research will necessarily involve the development of new tools for data capture, analysis and display. Kenderdine's iniatives at UNSW include the Laboratory for Innovation in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (iGLAM) and LUXLAB, an analytical laboratory in collaboration with Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University. I Sho U, a revolution in quantifying the embodied museum experience, is in development together with Dr. Anita Kocsis, Swinburne University. Sarah’s work is concentrated on cultural heritage in the greater Asian region, and the GLAMs sector worldwide.