French and American by upbringing, Cuban and English by blood, Saskia received her BA in Fine Art from UC Berkeley and her MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins.
A producer and curator for visual art and film, Saskia Wilson-Brown co-directed the seminal Silver Lake Film Festival and ran international filmmaker outreach and development for Al Gore’s Current TV. She went on to consult for media projects and initiatives around new models in filmmaking or the arts, including the peer-to-peer distribution system Vodo, Open Video Alliance/ Workbook Project Filmmaker Summit, Lance Weiler’s DIY Days, TED Conference's TEDActive Innovation Lab, and special independent film programs such as the biennial Ultra Fabulous: Beyond Drag and Cinema Speakeasy, a screening series that she founded in 2009. A committed advocate for information-sharing, she’s been invited to speak at a number of conferences and festivals including Sundance, DIY Days, Open Video Conference and Power to the Pixel; has served as an industry mentor at SXSW, and has been invited to program or jury for film festivals including Slamdance Film Festival and Gen Art. Her film work has been shown at TED Conference (2010) and in support of Marcos Lutyens' work at dOCUMENTA (2012), and her visual art work has been shown at institutions around the world, including Dom Omladine in Belgrade and the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires.
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. Through the IAO, she has collaborated on projects with institutions such as the Jet Propulsion Lab (NASA), The Pulitzer Foundation, Getty Institute, Hammer Museum, and Wallace Collection, among others.
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 and her team launched Scent Week, a bienial celebration of independent and experimental practices in scent that in its inaugural year took the form of a ten day festival with talks, parties, and workshops in Los Angeles.
In 2019 and 2020 she served as a visiting lecturer in the MA Fashion program at the Royal College of Art in London, and in 2020 and 2021 she was a Ballen Scholar at New Mexico Highlands University. In addition to running the IAO, Saskia's current pursuits include producing and hosting a radio show and podcast called Perfume on the Radio, writing a book (to be released in 2026), pursuing a PhD exploring the relations of power in the contemporary perfume industry at University College Dublin's SmartLab.