Sarah Mills is a historian of modern design and contemporary art and assistant professor at San José State University. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of craft media, specifically hand/digital weaving, fiber art, electronic art and wearables. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the Department of Design and the Art and Art History Department at SJSU. Her work has been supported by fellowships at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where Mills completed her M.Phil and PhD. Sarah joined the Board of the San José Museum of Quilts and Textiles in 2024 and chairs its exhibition committee.
Contact:
sarah.mills@sjsu.edu
Upcoming Speaking Events:
May 2nd, 2026: San Jose Museum of Art / San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, in conjunction with The Woven Pixel and Motherboards exhibitions
February 28th, 2026: In conversation with Kelly Egan, Kate Nartker and Kira Dominguez Hultgren, Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco —- in conjunction with the exhibition Video Craft.
Past Speaking Events:
Decorative Arts Trust Symposium, San Francisco “Material Engineering: From Liebes to the Tech Textiles of Silicon Valley,” October 26, 2025
Tronrud Engineering / TC2 Anniversary, Norway “The Concept Loom,” August 15, 2025
Palo Alto Art Center, Cut from the Same Cloth: Textiles and Technology, panel moderator with curator Christine Duval and artists Ahree Lee and Hideo Mabuchi, March 22nd, 2025
Unstable Design Lab, University of Colorado Boulder, March 31st, 2025
Midwest Art History Society Conference, “Design and Philosophy: A Case Study of Social Wearables,” April 4, 2025
Textile Society of America, “Becoming Craft, Textiles in the Art Museum,” Textile Society of America, November 14, 2024
San José State University, Thompson Gallery, “Digital Weaving: New Media’s Baby’s Mama,” April 16, 2024
CAA Chicago, “Fictitious Devices: The Extra-Embodied Experience of Kate Hartman’s Wearables,” in the panel “Post-Rationality,” February 17, 2024
OCAD University Toronto Canada, “Wearables, Textiles, and the Material-Media Interface in Contemporary Art,” October 25, 2023
Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland Ohio, “More Than Just Thread Control: Contemporary Weaving and Critical Distance,” June 2023
Prairie Ronde Gallery, Vicksburg, Michigan, “E-textiles: Into the Matrix,” October 2022
Museum of Applied Art and Science, Sydney, Australia, “Love Me in My GloWeave,” June 2022
Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York, “The College Art Gallery,” March 2022
Philosophia Honors Club, Westchester Community College, “Gender Fluidity in Art,” October 2021
Visual Arts Center, New Jersey, “The History of Silk Weaving in New Jersey and its Relationship to Contemporary Art,” January 2020
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, “Making the Modern Textile: Dorothy Liebes and the Handwoven Look,” March 2019