Sarah Bird

Sarah Bird is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on trees to investigate relationships among humans and the plant world. She is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz in Film and Digital Media where she is a Fellow of the Climate Action Lab. Her dissertation, titled “Strategies for Arboreal-Human Flourishing in the Anthropocene” focuses on tree relationality for an entangled, restorative future to our ecological crisis.

Her work is featured in Giants Rising (dir. Lisa Landers, 2024), a film about redwoods and their human champions, and her photographs were the inspiration for the 2023 show “Shallow Roots” at Upstart Modern in Sausalito, CA. She has a forthcoming installation, Entangled Arboreality, in Gießen, Germany and a public art project in downtown San Francisco titled Being:Tree. Sarah’s exhibitions include the 2016 Venice Biennale, commissions for Photo+Synthesis in Hudson, New York, and a solo exhibition at The Block Island Historical Society called Long-Term Residents: Trees of Block Island which explored the role of the island’s trees role nature-culture entanglements. In 2018, her 320-foot crime scene outline of a redwood tree at the UN Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco spoke to our need to address climate destruction in its true scale. She has a BA from Amherst College and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She is based in Mill Valley, CA and Wellfleet, MA.