Saskia Wilson-Brown believes that culture plays a pivotal role in bettering the human experience.
Born to Cuban-British bohemians in San Francisco—and raised between California and Paris—she received her BA in Fine Art from UC Berkeley and her MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. She then spent some time working on set (mostly in various roles in the production design department) for music videos and commercials before being invited as a co-director for the seminal Los Angeles-based Silver Lake Film Festival. From there, she was hired to oversee international filmmaker outreach and development for Al Gore’s Current TV, where she made frequent trips to the network’s London and Milan offices.
It was during this time that she began to consult for projects around new models in filmmaking or the arts. These included the pioneering peer-to-peer movie distribution system Vodo, as well as initiatives around accessibility in film like the Open Video Alliance/ Workbook Project Filmmaker Summit, and Lance Weiler’s DIY Days. She went on to work as a producer at TED Conference's TEDActive Innovation Lab, and initiated and produced special independent film programs, including a screening series that she founded in 2009 called Cinema Speakeasy.
In 2012, her interest in social arts practices led her to create The Institute for Art and Olfaction (IAO), a non-profit devoted to access and experimentation in perfumery. The following year, she established the Art and Olfaction Awards to honor innovation and excellence in perfumery, worldwide. Since then, she has produced editions of the awards in cities including Amsterdam, Berlin, Lisbon, London, Miami, and Los Angeles.
In 2018, she launched Open Sourcing Smell Culture to enhance accessibility for artists interested in olfactory art. This initiative aimed to foster knowledge-sharing in a domain often dominated by commercial interests. This was followed in 2021 by the initiation of the IAO Library, a collection of books and historic perfumes created in honor of Conor McTeague. In 2023, Saskia launched Scent Week, a collaborative, biennial celebration of independent and experimental practices in scent for Los Angeles that presents ten days of events, including talks, parties, exhibitions, and workshops. Through the IAO, she has initiated and collaborated on projects with institutions such as the Jet Propulsion Lab (NASA), Craft Contemporary, MSG Sphere in Las Vegas, The Pulitzer Foundation, Getty Institute, Hammer Museum, Wallace Collection, and so many more.
A committed advocate for information-sharing in the arts, Saskia is uniquely skilled at elucidating the structures that connect all forms of creative expression. Due to her open-minded pan-arts perspective, she has been invited to present at a number of conferences, festivals, and institutions that span different creative fields, including film, art, fashion, and perfumery. These include Sundance Film Festival, Open Video Conference, Power to the Pixel, World Perfumery Congress, IEEE’s intelligent Futures at SxSW, NASA House at SxSW, Getty Institute, Osmocosm at MIT Media Lab, Aspen Art Museum, LA County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles Fashion Film Festival, and many more. Between 2018 and 2020 she was a visiting lecturer at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, as well as a visiting lecturer in the MA Fashion program at the Royal College of Art in London. In 2020/2021 she was invited as a Ballen Scholar at New Mexico Highlands University, and also taught classes at universities like Wesleyan, Pratt Institute, and Art Center College of Design. Her short documentary film work has been shown at TED Conference (2010) and in support of Marcos Lutyens' exhibition at dOCUMENTA in Kassel (2012), and her visual art work has been shown at institutions that include Dom Omladine in Belgrade and the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires. In 2025 she curated Ether: Aromatic Mythologies, Los Angeles’s first museum exhibition exploring the impact of olfaction in contemporary art, at Craft Contemporary.
In addition to running the IAO and indulging her never-ending curiosity through collaborations and explorations, Saskia's current interests include producing and hosting a radio show (Lookout FM) turned podcast called Perfume on the Radio, writing a book (to be released by Distributed Art Publishers | DAP in 2026), and pursuing her PhD research exploring the role of scent in the context of creative practice at University College Dublin's SmartLab, which she expects to finish in 2026.