Sarah Buie, Director

Professor Sarah Buie is Director of the Higgins School of Humanities, and Professor of graphic design in the Studio Art program of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she has taught since 1981. She serves as Director of the Difficult Dialogues Initiative at Clark; in late 2005, Clark was chosen as one of 27 institutions nationwide to be funded by the Ford Foundation in their national DD initiative, for a proposal to “create a culture of dialogue on campus”. The project has included grassroots organizing among the faculty, a faculty development process, infusion of over 40 courses within the curriculum with a “dialogue emphasis”, a yearlong DD symposium, dialogue seminars accompanying the symposia, and much more (www.clarku.edu/difficultdialogues). She also currently leads the Mellon planning initiative, developing new directions in humanities pedagogy and research with support of the Mellon Foundation.

As a practicing museum exhibition designer for twenty-five years, Sarah designed over eighty temporary and permanent exhibitions for a range of clients including the Yale University Art Gallery, Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, the Institute for American Indian Studies, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, the Carnegie Institute Pittsburgh, and the Indira Gandhi Center for the Arts, New Delhi, among others. She also served for thirteen years as the Director of the University Gallery at Clark University, for which she curated and designed over thirty exhibitions.

She has studied the design of traditional sacred architecture in Nepal, India, Tibet, Bhutan and Japan; she teaches and writes on Sacred Space, exploring the language of spatial archetypes, especially as they offer insight into our relationship to the natural world. She has at least two book projects emerging from this work; also in process is a poetry and photography collection, In Search of the Reclining Buddha.

Sarah Buie serves on the Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), and is co-founder of the Humanities for the Environment initiative within CHCI. She is also on the board of the Public Conversations Project in Watertown, Massachusetts.

For more on Professor Sarah Buie's creative work, see the related article
Shaping Space to Tell a Story