Sandra Sardjono was raised in a Chinese Madurese family in Jakarta, Indonesia, where Indonesian textiles were part of everyday life. After leaving Indonesia to study in the United States, she developed a deeper appreciation for their beauty, significance, and role in shaping and reflecting cultural and artistic traditions.

Through academic studies and professional work in New York City and Los Angeles, she trained among leading textile specialists, studying world-class museum collections and learning to analyze ancient textiles to understand their structures, dyes, techniques, and methods of production. She began her career in textile conservation at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum before joining the Costume and Textiles Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as an assistant curator.

She later earned a Ph.D. in art history at the University of California, Berkeley, researching textile patterns depicted in Javanese sculpture and temple reliefs from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. Her doctoral research included three years in Leiden, the Netherlands, studying Indonesian art and early colonial textile collections.

In 2018, Sandra founded the Tracing Patterns Foundation to foster international research on traditional textiles while continuing to teach in Indonesia, inspiring the next generation of textile and fashion scholars and designers.