sue borchardt

As of the summer of 2026 I’m about half way through my MFA at Towson University. While I have a background in painting, I am currently exploring painting with light as projected onto 3D forms and spaces. A unifying thread in the work I’ve been doing is re-use.

Sometime around 2011 I started making short animations as a way to make sense of what I was learning in grad-school. These turned out to have value for others as well so I made a lot more after graduating, mostly as a freelance contractor. Every once in a while I try to take stock and create a catalog of all these animations. None of the catalogs is complete but they still give me a great sense of accomplishment. The image that comes to mind is Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill. From Sisyphus’ perspective, all the boulder-rolling is an endless loop. In my case a repeating loop of research, script-writing, drawing, animation, editing, scoring, sub-titling, promoting. But if the camera pans out from Sisyphus (or me) you see that out of the side of Sisyphus’ mountain there is a spool of narrative, or garden crops, or animations, or knitting… whatever it is that is one’s work in the world.
Below are two attempts at panning out and viewing “the knitting” that emerged during my years as an animator. In the catalog below you can click on an entry and if the animation is publicly available (i.e. my contract does not preclude me from sharing) then a link is provided to the animation so you can watch.

In a bit of recursion, many of the videos that attempt to “make sense” of something are about tools and methods FOR making sense of things! These include things like polarity mapping (Barry Johnson), the cynefin framework (Dave Snowden), wardley mapping (Simon Wardley), theory U (Otto Scharmer) and the innovators’ compass (Ela Ben-Ur).

The following is a tabular catalog of these animations in airtable (a user friendly no-code database platform).

I became a musician late in life, in part because I can’t seem to resist the urge to try a new instrument. I started out in 4th grade orchestra on cello, but didn’t love lugging it around so I switched to clarinet. Over the years I’ve dabbled in tenor sax, flute, harmonium, and mandolin, but my strongest skills are on ukulele, thanks to a beautiful concert kala given to me as a bday gift around 2010. Covid launched accordion lessons that have fallen by the wayside due to the time-commitment while in grad school. The most recent addition to the line-up is a sweet little firefly 5 string banjo made by the Magic Fluke Company.

My sister, Cindy, and I play out on occasion – mostly an eclectic mix of 20th century college radio covers. At times we have been joined by guitar player Lee Connah (as Silver Bi*ch). I’ve also played as a duo with (uh-maze-ink) guitar player Michael Raitzyk (as Gamma Waves), that leans more towards a jazz brunch vibe.

The banjo, although new for me, is getting some good air-time with a group of peeps I’ve known since high school made up up three ukes, a fiddle, and said banjo. We struggle to name ourselves but might have to soon ’cause we’re getting half-decent!

You can see videos of various duos and trios below.

and more videos here…

For booking inquires contact Sue Borchardt at [email protected]

Sue Borchardt Bio (and CV)

Currently… teaching a course on creativity at Towson University (about to my 6th iteration of that course!) and working on an MFA. Art school is the best thing ever. Though I started out in experimental animation, the motion I’ve been experimenting with lately has left the screen, created with projected light and installations.

Before that I was a freelance research artist, making animated short videos, telling stories about ideas, research, and ways of making sense of things. Before that I was a software engineer.

A bit about how I got here: My early life was almost exclusively focused on art, but a pivot in my early college years led to a professional life that was decidedly tech. I put a BS in Electrical Engineering to use designing and prototyping user interfaces for the first generation of color radar displays for the Navy, and later query tools and maps for the Human Genome Database as a software engineer.

After a fun, but perhaps not-so-fulfilling 15 years, I left software. A liminal era marked by twists and turns landed me at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE) to learn about learning, initially through the lenses of neuroscience, biology, and phenomenology. At HGSE, I was captivated by social and co-constructive perspectives on the question of why, whether, and how adults continue to learn and grow (individually and collectively) and ended up spending several years as a teaching fellow in a course called Group Learning. It was a wildly paradoxical context, focused both on how we as individuals learn IN groups, as well as how groups themselves are learning organisms – whether teams, families, communities, or societies. As a result, I pretty much look at every challenge as a learning challenge — even our seemingly intractable political and social issues.

I left HGSE in 2012 with a Masters in Human Development and Psychology, but I didn’t really leave. I joined the Learning Innovations Lab (LILA) where, for 7-ish years, I continued to explore the tensions between theory and practice. It was at LILA that I started using animation as a way to document the insights and puzzles that emerged as LILA members (chief learning officers and other organizational learning leaders) explored new research and practice. As a result, animation has become a core medium for me for putting sense-making into service — integrating art, ideas, technology, storytelling, and user experience.

Though I have fledged the LILA nest, I continue to deepen my skills in using animation and visual narrative as a means of revealing and deepening shared knowledge. My belief that most challenges are learning (or unlearning) challenges has only deepened over the years, sparking an interest in sensemaking tools, models, and frameworks like the cynefin framework, Wardley (strategy) mapping, polarity mapping, and design thinking tools.

While I was a one-person shop (handling script-writing/editing, drawing, animation, scoring, and video editing) I depended on collaborators for the up-front sense-making that serves as the raw material. Around 2020, I shifted away from contracts as it seemed to limit access to important knowledge and thinking by being accessible only inside organizations or behind paywalls. Working collaboratively allows me to make my work is available online to anyone who wants to watch it (no pay-walls).

Here are some nice things people have written about me and my animations

“I think the way you present your insights – as academic and rigorous as they are – is totally non-threatening and readily accessible to even casual viewers who may not be totally engaged. The videos seem to have the capacity to almost stealthily change attitudes and perceptions for the better, and ergo greatly improve group dynamics of all stripes. Can you tell I’m impressed?“

“You were the glue that kept us together. Thank you for your generosity, energy and creativity.“