My name is Sage Ugras and I use they/them pronouns. I am from Menlo Park, California. Menlo Park is a city that is approximately 45 minutes from San Francisco and is at the center of Silicon Valley/the Bay Area. 

In the past, I have taken art classes at school. I took a Studio Art class in high school where I made a self-portrait by erasing charcoal from a canvas, created an art piece using one continuous line that used up the entirety of a ballpoint pen, and learned different techniques for drawing cloth. In middle school I took the basic art elective where I learned about sketching, pottery, and painting, I also took a stop motion claymation course where I learned about clay modeling and motion, and a woodshop class where I created a tank using different woodworking techniques. 

Currently, I do a lot of print/stamp-making using rubber as the base for my hand-carved stamps. I have experimented with stamping on paper, cardboard, wrapping paper, canvas, and wood and would like to branch out to potentially making my own paper to then use for stamps. I usually sell my prints at the art fairs hosted at WPI. I also do film photography. I use 35mm color film and my Minolta X-700 and I usually take photos of either nature or random things that catch my eye when I walk down the street. I also have been experimenting a bit with 3D-printed art over the past year. 

Art fits into my life now through both my printmaking and my engineering design projects. Many of the projects that I do have both an engineering and an aesthetic component. This aesthetic component of my projects allows me to get into an artistic mindset when looking at something that may seem to only be a simple mechanism. 

In the future, I hope to continue improving my printmaking as well as get into more forms of art including kinetic art. I also hope that I am able to create products in the future, specifically assistive technologies, that, in addition to being useful, are also aesthetically beautiful. 

Some other creative arts I like to practice are poetry, short stories, and music curation. In addition to my major in Mechanical Engineering, I am working towards a minor in Creative Writing so that I can improve my writing skills and understand the different ways others write and read stories. I also am part of WWPI Radio where I have a 1-hour radio show once a week. This show allows me to curate music that is not usually played on traditional radio stations and highlight artists who do not get enough credit for their music. Music curation takes a lot of thought and consideration about how you want your audience to feel while listening. Especially when limited to a 1-hour slot, it is important to have a beginning, middle, and end to the playlist similar to a story.