Sara Cochran

Sara joined The Church in 2020 and has worked on over 10 exhibitions, including 4 major exhibitions she co-curated with Eric Fischl: Road Rage (2021), Empire of Water (2022),Threading the Needle (2022), and Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing (2023) and one with April Gornik: Return to a Place by the Sea (2023). Previously, she collaborated with artist Gregory Sale on his year-long project Future IDs on Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay. She was Director and Chief Curator at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, where she doubled the museum’s annual attendance, increased its revenue and vastly expanded its presence on social media. She curated 8 exhibitions there, including major shows with Betye Saar (2016) and Postcommodity (2015). She also organized a diverse series of programs with Founding Guerrilla Girl Kathe Kollwitz, artists Robert Irwin, Tom Sachs, Henry Rollins, Megan Rapinoe, and Dan Savage among many others, and oversaw a series of innovative events such asl film premiers, stand-up comedy, a book club, maker events, and an escape room. As Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Phoenix Art Museum, Cochran organized fifteen exhibitions including premiering and traveling Kehinde Wiley’s Memling Series in 2013. Under her leadership, the museum acquired over 200 works of art by artists such as Dan Graham, Sui Jianguo, Glenn Ligon, Maya Lin, Ruben Ochoa, Jennifer Steinkamp, Lawrence Weiner and Kehinde Wiley. Earlier in her career, she held curatorial positions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and has a Masters from Université de la Sorbonne, Paris IV. In 2015, she was participated in the Getty Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate Universities.