Bio and links
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 a bartender and struggling as an artist 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 and exhausted production assistant, then as a set dresser, and eventually as a production designer for commercials and music videos for Madonna, Marilyn Manson, Travis, Ronan Keating, and 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. There, she oversaw programs that included SLFF's Fringe Fest, a digital media showcase called MP4Fest, a cinematic exploration of Machinima, a program exploring video work around gender called 'Ultra Fabulous: Beyond Drag', and music programs with bands like Circle Jerks and Gravy Train!!! It all felt very edgy, at the time.
Saskia immersed herself in independent film, programming for film festivals like Slamdance and Gen Art, and in 2007 was hired to oversee international filmmaker outreach and development for Al Gore’s Current TV. She worked in the network’s San Francisco and Los Angeles offices, with frequent trips to the London and Milan locations, and was responsible for finding new filmmakers to work with the network through international collaborations and partnerships. It was during this time that she developed a keener sense of the difficulties facing independent artists, and she began to explore independent strategies for creative survival—writing occasional articles for indie film publications like Filmmaker Magazine, and consulting 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. Concurrently, she continued to produce independent arts and film programs that included Austin Young's performative 'Tranimal' workshops, and various programs showcasing Latino culture in collaboration with her father Adolfo Nodal. In 2009, after briefly working as a producer at TED Conference's TEDActive Innovation Lab, she founded a screening series called Cinema Speakeasy, which she ran with her friend and former colleague Georgi Goldman. The series was subsequently expanded to Palm Springs in partnership with Ace Hotel, and to San Francisco under the oversight of Allison Davis, Fhay Arceo and Kate Sullivan.
After folding Cinema Speakeasy in 2012, her interest in social art practices led her to create The Institute for Art and Olfaction (IAO), a non-profit devoted to access and experimentation in perfumery. The organization thrived, and within the first several years had served thousands of people through talks, workshops, exhibitions, and performances, including the sold out 'A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes, Revisited' performance series at Hammer Museum, which reimagined Sadakichi Hartmann's failed scent concert from 1903.
In 2013, she established the Art and Olfaction Awards as a mechanism designed to honor innovation and excellence in perfumery, worldwide. Since then, she and the IAO team have produced editions of the awards in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Berlin, Lisbon, London, Miami, and soon Athens (2026) and Mexico City (2027). In Berlin, in 2017, she conceived of the Experimental Scent Summit, a day-long gathering of experimental artist and academics, She has since produced that event yearly, alongside the awards, curating it in collaboration with artist Klara Ravat (Smell Lab) and the IAO's Minetta Rogers and Julianne Lee.
In 2018, she launched the IAO's Open Sourcing Smell Culture program, with the goal of enhancing accessibility for creative people who were interested in perfumery and olfactory art. This initiative fostered knowledge-sharing through open access databases, 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.
An artist, and 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 inventive and collaborative 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 in Santiago, 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 Jet Propulsion Lab, 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 she has additionally lectured at universities including Wesleyan, Pratt Institute, Brown, Middlebury College, Art Center College of Design, and more.
In 2024, she was invited by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Getty’s PST ART (Pacific Standard Time: Art & Science Collide) to participate in the exhibition 'Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary Imagination' at the Brand Library & Art Center. In collaboration with sound artist 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, which served as Los Angeles’s first museum exhibition devored to olfaction's role in contemporary art, and presented olfaction-led art installations exploring mythology by thirteen international artists.
In addition to serving as Executive Director at the IAO, Saskia’s current interests include producing and hosting a radio show-turned podcast called Perfume on the Radio, which premiered on Los Angeles' Lookout FM in 2020. She is currently in the last stages of 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 early 2027, and her book, 'The Cultures of Perfume: Scents that Shaped History' will be published by D.A.P. in November, 2026.
She lives in Los Angeles with her creative partner Micah Hahn, a typographer and designer whose work can be found at autumnseventy.com.