Sophia Collender

Sophia Collender is a New York–based artist and researcher. Her work, in copper, acrylic, biomaterials, concrete, video and code, exposes the raw materials of computation and imagines alternative hardware, tools and systems.

She is interested in how our relationships to the physical world can be structured differently, and how digital tools can be mobilized to convey that. She is fascinated by the austere, industrial, sterile and thoroughly metal environments wrought by technology, and the impulse it creates in her to cover it in dirt, corrode it, and push it against the sublime.

She is drawn to materials that are sustainable, tactile and honest about their construction. Her research on transit interoperability examined how fare payment systems enforce and challenge questions of who is included and excluded. The Experimental Paint Archive, an open-source library of biodegradable, DIY-safe art materials, is designed to lower barriers to entry in material experimentation.

Collender received an M.P.S. from NYU Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (2026) and a B.A. in Film from Fordham University (2024). Her work has been shown at the New York Transit Museum, Yale CCAM, the Mamdouha S. Bobst Gallery, FLOHAUS Gallery and The Horological Society of New York, and supported by the Interledger Foundation and the NYU Prototyping Fund, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The Experimental Paint Archive has been covered by Designboom, Free York, Biofuels Digest and Burner Union.