Sarah Kornfeld is an American author, producer, and cultural executive whose work explores the intersections of love, trauma, and cultural resilience through fiction, journalism, and creative projects.
Raised in the experimental theater of New York City, Sarah grew up immersed in the avant-garde world of her father, Lawrence Kornfeld, the managing director of The Living Theater and founder of The Judson Poets Theater and Theater for the New City. These iconic spaces shaped her early artistic sensibilities, where she performed with The Bread and Puppet Theater, The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and other pioneering ensembles.
Sarah’s writing is informed by her early experience engaging with and looking at bodies in spaces. She started working in installation and site-specific performance at seventeen, when her mentor, Elise Bernhardt, founded Dancing In The Streets, and trained her on both the French American Dance Exchange and the seminal Grand Central Dances. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, she studied dance and choreography with Viola Farber, Bill T. Jones, David Gordon, and Elizabeth Streb. At Sarah Lawrence, she also studied writing and developed plays utilizing pastiche-based techniques pioneered by David Bowie and Brian Eno.
These expansive theater experiences informed her as a writer, and her debut novel, What Stella Sees (2018), was celebrated for its poetic prose and psychological depth"Imaginative, eloquent, poetic, and profoundly insightful...the entire book reads with like grace. In a word, inimitable."
— Grady Harp, Art & Poetry Contributor for POETS & WRITERS magazine
Her most recent narrative nonfiction book, The True, was published by Editura Integral and launched at the National Theater Festival of Bucharest in 2021. Hailed as “an extraordinary satire of the corrupt economy engulfing the world”(Rain Taxi Review), the book examines cultural alienation and exile through the lens of her lover’s (Alexandru Darie) mysterious death in Bucharest, Romania. It was also featured at the Bucharest LibFest, 2021.
Sarah is currently working on Juno, And the Long Eye of History, a historical literary novel set in Budapest in 1900. Narrated by Juno, a Nonius horse, the novel reimagines her family’s past through the lives of four sisters navigating a night of transformation. The story unfolds against a backdrop of political shifts, early Zionist conflicts, and the cultural dissonance of modernization. Through Juno’s eyes, the book examines how migration—both human and animal—shapes identity, belonging, and survival.
Beyond fiction, Sarah’s journalism examines the creative economy, cultural policy, and sustainability. Her work has been featured in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Theater Times, and the “Portrait of the Artists” series for the NEAR Foundation. She has co-authored thought leadership pieces through The Resilient Economy, a platform dedicated to innovation in the Creative Economy.
A frequent speaker on creative resilience and cultural innovation, Sarah was a featured guest at the Women in Web3 Global Summit at Davos in 2024. For 25 years, she lived by the sea in California, where she taught Cultural Curation at San Francisco University. Now, back in New York, she continues to write, collaborate, and advocate for the power of storytelling to reimagine how we move through the world.