About Saskia
Saskia Wilson-Brown was 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. After working as an artist (and bartender) in London, she moved to Los Angeles where she worked on commercial and music video sets in various roles in the production design department. Starting as a lowly but mighty production assistant, then as set dresser for the likes of Madonna, Marilyn Manson, Travis, Ronan Keating, and others, and eventually working as a production designer on several videos for hip-hop icon Master P. In 2005, she became involved in the seminal Los Angeles-based Silver Lake Film Festival, eventually taking on the role of festival co-director. From there, she was hired to oversee international filmmaker outreach and development for Al Gore’s Current TV, where she worked in the network’s San Francisco and Los Angeles offices, with frequent trips to the London and Milan locations.
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 (led by filmmaker Jamie King), 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, while curating and producing 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 with the goal of enhancing accessibility for artists interested in olfactory art. This initiative aimed to foster knowledge-sharing in a domain often dominated by commercial interests. This was expanded upon in 2021 by the initiation of the IAO Library, a collection of books and historic perfumes created in honor of the late perfume writer, Conor McTeague. In 2023, she launched Scent Week, a collaborative, biennial celebration of independent and experimental practices in scent for Los Angeles that presented ten days of events, including talks, parties, exhibitions, and workshops, and returned to Los Angeles in 2025.
A committed advocate for information-sharing in the arts, Saskia is uniquely skilled at elucidating the structures that connect all forms of creative expression. With her characteristically open-minded, collaborative, and pan-arts perspective, she has been invited to present at a number of conferences, festivals, and institutions that span different creative fields. These include the Chilean Foreign Ministry, 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 others. Through her work with the IAO, she has also been invited to initiate and collaborate 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.
Between 2018 and 2020 she was a visiting lecturer at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, and 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 2024, she collaborated with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Getty’s PST ART (Pacific Standard Time: Art & Science Collide) initiative in the exhibition “Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary Imagination” at the Brand Library & Art Center. In collaboration with Shane Myrbeck, their installation, “Sensory Mementos,” imagined a future human recreating the lost smells of Earth while living off-planet, and presented 24 scent compositions led by NASA research into the elemental and chemical makeup of both Earth and outer space. In 2025, she curated Ether: Aromatic Mythologies at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles’s first museum exhibition exploring the impact of olfaction in contemporary art. This presented olfaction-led art installations exploring mythology, by thirteen international artists.
In addition to running the IAO, Saskia’s current interests include producing and hosting a podcast | radio show for Lookout FM called Perfume on the Radio, 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.
Her book, The Cultures of Scent, will be published by D.A.P. in November, 2026.
She lives in Los Angeles with her creative partner and best friend Micah Hahn, a typographer and designer whose work can be found at autumnseventy.com.