Sarah Lammer

This month’s installment of our Staff Spotlight series features Beam Project Designer, Sarah Lammer. As a Project Designer Sarah works collaboratively with teachers from our partner schools to design and facilitate projects in classrooms.

Sarah's introduction to Beam Center was in 2015 during a weekend workshop we hosted at The Invisible Dog Art Center on Bergen Street, where a group of teenagers were critiquing a visiting artist's artwork. Afterwards, she worked at our weekend workshops a couple of times before she was brought to the team officially in 2016. 

As an artist, Sarah is always learning how to be a better teacher in order to create good environments for young people. In addition to her work in classrooms, Sarah works with teachers during Beam’s Professional Development sessions. She has a unique perspective on working with teachers, saying “I really like working with teachers in Professional Development and treating them like just the weird artist, improvisers that they are most of the time.”

Students at Manhattan Comprehensive, Sarah’s current school placement

Sarah’s first in school project was at The Benjamin Franklin Health & Science Academy where she worked with second graders. Looking back on this first project, Sarah says “I really loved the little people. They were just all so different and most of the time we had a language barrier, but we still made things together.” At the school, Sarah worked with students to help them build a miniature computer to advance technology and communication. She spoke fondly about the students and said, “these kids were brilliant, making cardboard computers with all of the components and…getting into illustration.” She added that even though the students were faced with a lot of barriers, “the kids were still persevering through it all.”

When asked what she thinks is unique about Beam Center, Sarah says, “I think it’s really unique how much agency we as staff have had in the way that we write our projects and the way that we are able to pass that agency onto young people. There’s a lot of radical trust that gets us into really insane, powerful and stressful, beautiful situations.” 

In addition to being a full-time employee at Beam Center, Sarah is an interdisciplinary artist. Sarah works with a variety of media, including drawing, airbrush, animation, casting, and turning physical objects into digital objects. To learn more about her artwork, visit her website.

We are grateful to Sarah for all her work at Beam. Thank you for being a part of the Beam team