Sarah Kornfeld is an American writer and cultural producer whose work explores exile, resilience, and diasporic storytelling across literature, performance, and transnational media. Her practice moves between the archive and the stage, the novel and the symposium — grounded in rigorous research, ethical production, and a commitment to stories that cross borders. She moves between Philadelphia and London.

WRITING

Her forthcoming novel Juno, and the Long Eye of History is set on a single day and night in 1900 Budapest, centred on a Hungarian Jewish theatrical family navigating assimilation, artistic life, and political upheaval. The manuscript draws on four years of archival research in collaboration with scholars at the Petőfi Literary Museum–Kassák Museum, the Centre for Social Sciences Budapest, and the University of Graz. Juno is the culmination of a body of fiction that includes The True (Editura Integral, 2021) — praised by Rain Taxi as "an extraordinary satire of the corrupt economy engulfing the world" — and What Stella Sees (Cove International, 2018), described by Poets and Artists as "imaginative, eloquent, poetic, and profoundly insightful… inimitable."

Her essays, criticism, and cultural dispatches have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, CultureBot, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and the Jewish Book Council. Since 2025, she writes Letters from London for CultureBot.

SCHOLARSHIP

Kornfeld became a Visiting Scholar at the University of Westminster (CAMRI) through her collaboration with Dr. Ekua Agha on Aguda Returns: 1830 to The Future — a project built upon years of primary research and oral histories of the Aguda, the Afro-Brazilian returnees of West Africa — which brought her into formal academic partnership and established the intellectual foundations of her transnational practice. Her work at University of Westminster, London, now spans diasporic governance, transnational media systems, and cultural infrastructure. In 2026 she was awarded the University of Westminster Research Communities Interdisciplinary Innovation Fund for the project Diasporic Governance, Media Systems, and Transnational Cultural Infrastructure. She is also leading Media After Orbán, a research and public programming initiative on Hungarian media freedom and independent journalism, with panel and publication outputs in 2026.

PRODUCTION

As Executive Producer of Wednesday 66 Productions (London), Kornfeld produces at the intersection of research, storytelling, and public engagement. Her current production is Aguda Returns: 1830 to The Future — a symposium and documentary on Afro-Brazilian cultural memory, produced in partnership with CAMRI and the Africa Creative Futures Programme, connecting institutions across London, Lagos, and the Global Majority. She is also co-author, with Dr. Ekua Agha, of Radical Immersion: Designing Immersive Experiences That Reclaim Histories, a trauma-informed framework for cultural storytelling shortlisted for the Dubai Futures Forum 2025.

Earlier producing work includes partnership development at The Kitchen (New York) — uniting artists including Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson with the Ford Foundation — and a decade of narrative strategy work with clients including Netflix, the California Academy of Sciences, the Institute for the Future, and the Blue Mind Summit/Blue Marble Project with Dr. Wallace J. Nichols.

ART + TECHNOLOGY

Over two decades at the intersection of art and innovation, Kornfeld has collaborated with Google Earth, Obscura Digital, The Institute for the Future, Pop!Tech and the California Academy of Sciences. Formerly with Burson-Marsteller, she launched the firm's first influencer-relations and thought-leadership division in Silicon Valley, later she was a member of the NEAR governance movement on the blockchain and was a speaker at the Women in Web3 Summit in Davos, 2024.

FORMATION

Raised in New York's avant-garde theatre, Sarah is the daughter of Lawrence Kornfeld — co-founder of Judson Poets Theater and Theater for the New City, and General Manager of The Living Theater. She trained and performed with the Bread and Puppet Theater and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and studied choreography with Viola Farber, Bill T. Jones, and David Gordon. She later trained at the Royal Court Theatre, London. She holds a B.A. in Literature and Performance from Sarah Lawrence College and is a member of the National Writers Union (AFL-CIO).