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• Sara Diamond
• 16/08/2012
• Consultant, Canada
• President of the Ontario College of Art and Design and Chair of the Mobile Experience Innovation Centre. Sara was also the Founder and Artistic Director of Media and Visual Art at the Banff New Media Institute until 2008.
  

Sara Diamond is the President of OCAD University (formerly the Ontario College of Art & Design), Canada’s foremost university of art and design. She holds degrees from Canada and the United Kingdom in social history, communications, digital media theory and computer science. She is currently a member of the Ontario Ministry of Culture’s Minister’s Advisory Council on Arts & Culture, the Board of Directors of the Toronto Arts Council Foundation and of ORANO, Ontario’s high speed network. She is a founding member of CONCERT and the Chair of the OMDC funded Mobile Experience Innovation Centre. She has received numerous research awards for her work in visualization, mobile content design, wearable technologies and collaborative tools. She is a visualization software researcher and developer at Code Zebra.

Diamond created and was Editor-in-Chief of horizonzero.ca, an online showcase for new media art and design, in collaboration with Heritage Canada.  Diamond participates in peer review publication and diverse editorial boards such as Leonardo on-line and Convergence. She provides media consulting to Heritage Canada, SSHRC, CFI, Industry Canada, CHRC and DFAIT, as well as international governments, institutions and agencies as diverse as China, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Finland, Australia, Brazil and the USA.

Prior to her presidency at OCAD Diamond was the Director of Research for the prestigious Banff Centre. She created the renowned Banff New Media Institute (BNMI) in 1995 and led it until coming to Toronto in 2005. Diamond developed international summits and business development workshops and accelerators that explored the near future of new media. She built alliances between artists, designers, architects, scientists, social scientists, and international and Canadian businesses.

Diamond taught at Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design, The California Institute for the Arts and remains Adjunct Professor, University of California, Los Angeles in the Design/Media Department. In 2007 she was named one of Canada’s fifty most significant artists as part of the Canada Council’s fiftieth anniversary celebration.  Her work resides in collections such as the National Gallery of Canada, where she was honored with a retrospective in 1992 and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.