Sarah Jane Pell

Sarah Jane Pell (born 30 December 1974) is an Australian artist, researcher and occupational diver. Her works combine the traditions of Performance art and human factors with Underwater habitat and Occupational diving technologies.

Career

Early professional career Pell has been a visual and performing arts professional for over 20 years. Her first major art production captioned "The Many-to-Many World" premiered in the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria (1997) and it incorporated climbing in the trans-disciplinary Choreography. Sarah supported her art by working for well-respected curators, galleries, festivals and museums before moving to Western Australia in 2001. Among them include:

The Many-To-Many World, The Great Hall National Gallery of Victoria (1997) Training, National Review of Live Art, Midland, Western Australia (2002) Second Nature: Second Skin, National Review of Live Art, Glasgow (2003) Under Current, Hydrophilia Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2003, 2004) Hydrophilia''', BEAP04 Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (2004) • LifeBoat – mobile life art laboratory – collaboration with Nigel Helyer, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, ISEA04 International Symposium of Electronic Arts, The Baltic (2004), Touch Me Festival: OutInOpen, Zargreb (2005) Under Current, Bonnington Gallery, UK (2004) Petrification – collaboration with Lawrence English, ARC Biennial, Brisbane (2005) Hydrophilia, Tract -Live Art Festival, Art Surgery & Newlyn Art Gallery, UK (2006) Deep Performance Enhancement,'' Fremantle Arts Centre, AU (2013)

Films Pell has written, produced and performed in her own films.

In 2006, Dennis Chamberland invited Pell as Official Artist-Aquanaut of the Atlantica Expeditions undersea habitat mission. In 2004, Pell was awarded a Freedman Foundation Travelling Arts Scholarship to research the archives at the Live Art Archive, Nottingham Trent University, the Live Art Development Agency, London and the British Library. In 2007, Leonardo LABS, MIT, awarded Pell the "Best PhD Art & Science". Pell was a visiting research fellow RMIT University (2012–2015), researching interaction design and human computing in novel bodily interfaces suitable for extending human performance experience underwater in the context of exertion games.

Astronaut candidate In 2016, Dr. Pell qualified as an Artist-Astronaut Candidate for the suborbital spaceflight aeronomy experiment with Project PoSSUM.

Other endeavours Pell serves on SeaSpace Boards and Committees. She is a TED Fellow.

Pell has authored and co-authored several publications. She also visited many space agencies and designed and exhibited on a space-art payload that was launched into orbit with JAXA 2009.

Awards and honours 2010 – TED (conference) Fellow 2016 – Australia Council Fellow

Personal life Pell currently resides in Australia and researches extreme performance and aqueous architectures for future use in outer space.