The University of Maine at Presque Isle will present digital artist Sarah Sweeney as the next speaker in its 2025-2026 Libra Distinguished Lecture Series on Thursday, Nov. 20 at 6 p.m. in the Campus Center and via Zoom. Sweeney will deliver a talk titled My Deepfake Dad, which examines the question, “How do you talk to someone who is no longer here?” The public is encouraged to attend this free event as well as enjoy a reception with light refreshments after the talk.
Sweeney’s father passed away when he was 44 and she was 17. When she turned 44, she decided to find a way to talk to him again. The resulting project, Conversations with My Deepfake Dad, uses artificial intelligence, archival materials, interviews, and other source material to construct a series of audio conversations and photographs featuring her deceased father. During her talk, Sweeney will discuss the project as a whole, share the ethical and technological challenges she faced, and play the second conversation in this series.
Sweeney is an artist who creates digital interventions in photography, sound and video. She works across a range of media forms, including photographic composites, iPhone apps, photographic sculptures, augmented reality, stereoscopy, animation, video, and Instagram feeds. In each piece, she weaves small bits of recorded material into larger objects that are simultaneously real and imagined.
She serves as the Ella Van Dyke Tuthill ’32 Chair in Studio Art at Skidmore College in New York and received her bachelor’s degree from Williams College and her MFA from Columbia University.
Sweeney has been an artist in residence at MASSMoCA, CultureHub, and Catwalk. Her work has appeared nationally and internationally in exhibitions at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the New Jersey State Museum, the Black and White Gallery, Bucharest Art Week, the Meet Factory, Wave Farm, and the UCR/California Photography Museum.
She has published articles in MAST, Accelerate and HASTAC and co-guest edited Media-N, the journal for the New Media Caucus of the College Art Association. She has given academic and artist talks about erasure, ordinary media, and memory objects at BRIC, MIT, Green-Wood Cemetery, the Tang Museum, and the International Symposium on Electronic Art.
The University’s Libra Distinguished Lecture Series was established in 1999. Each year, the LDLS Committee sponsors four to six speakers who come from Maine and beyond, representing a range of disciplines and viewpoints. While the emphasis tends to be on featuring visiting academics, it is not exclusively so. The speakers typically spend two days at the University meeting with classes and presenting a community lecture.
UMPI welcomes the campus and community to hear Sweeney speak on Nov. 20. For more information, about Sweeney, visit www.sarahelizabethsweeney.com. For more information about this event, contact Emma McNally at 207-768-9520 or email emma.mcnally@maine.edu.