My name is Sarah Abraham, and I am a lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Computer Science. For my dissertation, I worked with Don Fussell in the high performance computer graphics lab with an interest in non-photorealistic rendering, and intuitive simulation-based tools for artists.
My other interest is video game design and programming. Video games fascinate me as both an artistic and entertainment medium, and I am very inspired by the film makers Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, and Yuri Norstein, as well as the philosophy and humanity of the 19th Century Russian writers such as Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. I believe video games can foster greater cooperation and empathy, and I am exploring this through my company, Akula Games.
Skazka: Exploring Empathy Through Cooperative Mechanics and Narrative.. Sarah Abraham. Rivers, S. E., & McDonald, H. (2018). Well Played — Vol. 7, No. 2. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.
Smoke Brush. Sarah Abraham and Donald Fussell. 2014. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering (NPAR '14).