Sarah Sukumaran is a multidisciplinary creative & visual storyteller, born & raised in Elmhurst, Queens, NY. She is the founder of Lilith NYC, a global lifestyle & footwear brand.
Prior to starting Lilith, Sarah was Director of Product at Nike, where she led product & engineering teams and oversaw the development of Zodiac, Nike’s machine learning & predictive analytics platform. She has spent the last 15 years in the Enterprise SaaS tech space including a Head of Product role at Jirafe, a merchandising analytics startup that was acquired by SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly SAP Hybris) in 2016.
She holds a BS in Business Management from Babson College and is a 2023 Tory Burch Foundation Fellow.
Outside of tech and footwear, Sarah spends her time gallery hopping, traveling, documenting life in Nainativu & the surrounding theevus, and investing in fellow women and femme founded companies.
Photo Credit: Jonathan Wijayaratne
Styling: Tara Germani
Sarah Sukumaran (b. 1986) was born and raised in Elmhurst, Queens, NY, the daughter of Eelam Tamil refugees. Her work is a direct spatial and material intervention against the exclusion of women in a historically male-dominated sneaker industry and culture.
For decades, the industry has treated women consumers as an afterthought, relegating them to reductive iterations of male-designed silhouettes. Sukumaran co-opts the notion of masculinity and utility by asserting that luxury, high-performance design—such as rugged outsoles and tactical materials, belong inherently to women.
Deeply rooted in narrative, her creative process is an archival exploration of personal history—her Tamil roots & ancestral home in Nainativu | நயினாதீவு (island of serpents), to her upbringing in Queens, NY and love of tropical modernist architecture and divine feminine mythology.
By (re)claiming space, her designs serve as a material intervention and archive to document socio-cultural histories of resilience, community, and identity, thereby actively subverting current dominant industry paradigms.
© 2026 Sarah Sukumaran