ACI-Surfing with ... Saskia Wilson-Brown

24.03.2021 6pm (CET) 10am (PST)

Saskia Wilson-Brown

French and American by upbringing, Cuban and English by blood, Saskia received her BA (fine art) from UC Berkeley and her MA (fine art) from Central Saint Martins.

A producer and curator for visual art and film, Saskia co-directed the seminal Silver Lake Film Festival, ran international outreach and development for Al Gore’s Current TV, and has consulted on a number of arts, film and transmedia projects, including the P2P distribution platform VODO, DIY Days, TEDActive and Slamdance Film Festival. In 2012, her interest in unorthodox practices led her to create The Institute for Art and Olfaction (IAO), a non-profit arts organization devoted to experimentation, access, and education in perfumery. Through the IAO, she has launched partnerships with institutions such as Goethe Institut, Hammer Museum, Getty Institute, Danish Film Institute and National Media Museum UK (with Tammy Burnstock), Standard Hotel, Atlas Obscura, Huntington Library, Wallace Collection, Silent Green Kulturquartier, Watts Gallery, LACMA, and many more. In 2013, she launched the Art and Olfaction Awards, an awards mechanism for independent, artisan and experimental perfumers, which she has produced in Los Angeles, Berlin, London and Amsterdam. In addition to countless art installations and events, she has also produced large public-facing experimental programs relating to olfaction including the Biennial Scent Fair LA (with Darin Klein) and the annual Experimental Scent Summit (with Klara Ravat). Recent projects include a multi-year exploration of open source strategies in scent-making called Open Sourcing Smell Culture, building and maintaining a perfume garden servicing the Bell Homeless Shelter in Los Angeles in partnership with GrowGood.

In 2019 and 2020, Saskia was a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London, teaching about scent-making as a creative practice in the MA Fashion program. In March of 2020, when Covid-19 made travel and in-person events impossible, she spearheaded a quick launch of an online division of the Institute for Art and Olfaction. Through artandolfaction.online, the Institute for Art and Olfaction (IAO) team and collaborating teachers served just over 600 people from diverse locations around the world, within the first 30 days. This allowed the IAO to continue its mission to facilitate access to the tools and information of perfumery, while reaching an even wider audience through increasingly affordable, well-researched and authentic online education.

Current projects include producing a semi-monthly radio show called Perfume on the Radio and finishing a documentary about ownership and historic reconstruction in the field of perfumery while pursuing a PhD about the relationship between perfume, access and power.

https://www.instagram.com/artandolfaction/