A/ProfZoe Sadokierski

Dr Zoë Sadokierski is a book designer, author and creative producer. She is an associate professor in Visual Communication and co-director of the UTS Visualisation Institute. In 2010, she completed a practice-based PhD on the narrative function of graphic devices (photographs, illustrations, experimental typography) in literary fiction.

Her research investigates ways that visual communication – including illustrated nonfiction and data storytelling - can be used to make complex issues intelligible to broad audiences. Current collaborations with the Australian Museum, the National Museum of Australia, the Powerhouse Museum and Chau Chak Wing Museum explore ways multimedia storytelling can be used to engage adult audiences in complex problems including species extinction and other consequences of humans meddling with the natural world. As museums and other cultural institutions digitise their collections, opportunities emerge for exploring how this material can be used to critique and expand the way we narrate histories and speculate futures; through her practice-based research, Zoë produces 'anarchival' stories through collage, print making, creative nonfiction writing and narrative information visualisations. 

Specific projects include: Survival Stories, a collaboration with the Australian Museum which aims to develop, implement and evaluate design-led approaches to engaging adult audiences in conservation of threatened species; the Urban Field Naturalist Project, a cross-disciplinary collaboration between design, environmental humanities and natural sciences which explores ways community storytelling can foster a sense of belonging to place and responsibility for urban ecosystems; Precarious Birds, a collaboration with Dr Timo Rissanen which uses creative practice to translate the complexities of human/avian entanglement in the extinction crisis, in order to avoid 'ecological amnesia'; Animal Allegories, a collaboration with writer Ceridwen Dovey, explores the critical role creative nonfiction storytelling can play in helping people understand human entanglement in the natural world as our species adapts to frightening new ecological realities.

Her book Father, Son and Other Animals (Cordite Books, 2024) explores climate change and species extinction through the lenses of parenting and creative practice. Her scholarly writing appears in journals including Design Studies, Visual Communication, Tracey, Book 2.0, Logos, and she has chapters in Making Data Materialising Information (Bloomsbury 2022), Practice Based Design Research (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Routledge Companion to Design Research (2014, 2023) and Publishing and Culture (Cambridge Scholars, 2019). Zoë has been invited to speak about her research and practice at the Sydney Writers' Festival, Parsons School of Design, Vivid, The Wheeler Centre, National Library of Australia, Art Gallery of NSW and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney). In 2015 she established Page Screen Books to distribute her artist books and editions. She is a founding member and former president of the Australian Book Designers Association, and has won multiple awards for her book designs. Her works on paper and artist books have been exhibited in galleries including Gagosian Gallery (LA), Science Centre (Delft), and national galleries including Brenda May, First Draft, UNSW Galleries, John Curtin Gallery, Bundanon Art and NG Art, and acquired by the National Library of Australia, state libraries of NSW, Victoria and Queensland, and UTS Library, and the Library of Artistic Print on Demand (Munich).