Sara Ludy (American, b. 1980) is an artist working across painting, video, virtual reality and other digital media, weaving intuitive and computational processes into hybrid forms.Her practice grows out of a long engagement with dream states, non-ordinary perception and cosmology, exploring the nature of immaterial experience such as memories and consciousness.,
Ludy was born in Orange, California, and raised in Bluemont, Virginia.She studied painting, sound and new media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After remembering her first lucid dream in 2002, Ludy created Dream House, 2014, a virtual architectural 3D model of a dream space incorporating two rooms drawn directly from her own lucid dreams.,Since 2011 she has continued the series Clouds, using fractal and turbulence software plugins to generate layered, painterly animations that evoke atmospheric natural phenomena.,
Ludy co-founded the collaborative project Wallpapers with Nicolas Sassoon and Sylvain Sailly, publishing a catalogue of digital patterns online and translating them into site-specific projection installations offline.The project's first gallery installation opened at 319 Scholes in Brooklyn in July 2011, curated by Lindsay Howard, and drew on the pair's individual and collaborative online work exploring interior space, home and architecture.In 2015 Wallpapers filled the Vancouver Art Gallery for the exhibition “Beyond the Trees: Wallpapers in Conversation with Emily Carr”.For “Digital Combines” at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles in 2022, Ludy modeled abstracted environments in 3D, then transformed them using software including Photoshop and Maya, pairing a physical painting on linen with an NFT video file summoned by an accompanying QR code.
Ludy began working with AI image generators in 2022, starting with DALL-E Mini, and used the tool's low-resolution artifacts as source material for paintings before deleting the original AI generations. That year she also made her first moving-image AI work, Daance Dange Daice, a series of 225 images choreographed to music for Miami's Refraction Festival, where it had been commissioned, and released on the platform Zora.By 2025 she described her sensibility as postdigital rather than digital, saying she had not made a digital work in almost a year and had returned to painting. She has described the shift as “not about rejecting the digital, but about having moved through it”. Paintings including On Days, 2024, and Horse Horse Scorpion, 2025, appeared in her solo exhibition “Later Fields” at Smart Objects in Los Angeles in 2025.
