Etta Sandry

Etta Sandry is an artist, educator, and researcher currently based in Boulder, Colorado. With a practice rooted in weaving, she works between craft, contemporary art, and creative research. Through making, writing, teaching, and facilitating, she explores craft practices as socio-technical systems that have historically been overlooked and undervalued as modes of knowledge and technical production. This work looks at craft materials and processes as systems that enact distinct forms and functions – like the interlaced grid of a woven cloth or the spiraling twist of a plied thread – and are entangled in ongoing social and political histories that impact how we take them up in art, design, and daily use. Etta has exhibited work in the United States and Canada and was the 2022 Experimental Weaver in Residence at the Unstable Design Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder where they now conduct research as a PhD student. They have taught weaving and fiber classes at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and Catskill Weaving School and have worked as an organizer and administrator in numerous arts communities, including roles as a board member for the artist-run centre articule in Montreal ACRE Residency in Chicago/Wisconsin. Etta received an MFA in the Fibre & Material Practices program at Concordia University.

Publications

Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Viola Arduini, Etta W Sandry, Srujana Golla, Laura Devendorf, and Mirela Alistar. 2025. “Bioactuated Textiles: Exploring Reversible Actuation of Casein Bioplastic in Woven Textiles”. In: Companion of the 2025 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp Companion ’25). (Espoo, Finland, October 12–16, 2025).

Etta W Sandry, Lily M Gabriel, Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, and Laura Devendorf. 2025. “Towards Yarnier Interactive Textiles: Mapping a Design Journey through Hand Spun Conductive Yarns”. In: Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '25). (July 5–9, 2025, Funchal, Portugal)

Laura Devendorf, Deanna Gelosi, Steven Frost, Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Etta W Sandry, Lily M Gabriel, Mikhaila Friske, Sasha de Koninck, Shanel Wu. 2025. “Experimental Weaving at the Unstable Design Lab”. In: CHI EA '25: Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (Yokohama, Japan; April 26 - May 1, 2025).

Etta Sandry. 2024. “Inconclusive Objects: Sample Making as Inquiry-Driven Practice.” In: Proceedings from Textile Society of America 2024 Symposium, Shifts & Strands: Rethinking the Potentials of Textiles. (Virtual Event, November 12-17, 2024).

Kristina Andersen, Bruna Goveia da Rocha, Laura Devendorf, Elvia Vasconcelos, Lee Jones, Irene Posch, Anuradha Venugopal Reddy, Aisling Kelliher, Verena Fuchsberger, Lone Koefoed Hansen and Etta Sandry. 2024. "Memoirs for the Future, Imaginations of the Past: Crafting Samplers for Intent and Commitment". In: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '24), (Copenhagen, Denmark, July 1-5 2024).

Laura Devendorf, Kathryn Walters, Marianne Fairbanks, Etta Sandry, Emma R. Goodwill. 2023. “AdaCAD: Parametric Design as a New Form of Notation for Complex Weaving”. In: CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Hamburg, Germany, April 23-28, 2023).  

Laura Devendorf, Sasha De Koninck, and Etta Sandry. 2022. An Introduction to Weave Structure for HCI: A How-to and Reflection on Modes of Exchange. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’22), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. 629-642. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3534567 (June 13-17, 2022—Virtual Event, Australia) [Best Pictorial Honorable Mention Award].