Sasha Michelle White (she/her) is an artist, ecologist, and interdisciplinary researcher who engages the aesthetic ecologies of the Pacific Northwest’s fire-prone landscapes. As a child growing up in rural Michigan, Sasha wandered through fields and forests, cataloguing weeds and wildflowers onto a battered set of index cards. This early interest in ecological literacy resurfaced in her artistic work during a 2004 residency on Monhegan Island, ten miles off the coast of Maine. Already concerned with issues of reading, book-ness and bodily presence, an emergency surgery and subsequent convalescence shifted her attention to how the elemental presences of wind and water, salt and sulphur, bird, plant, and whale life inscribe the landscape.
Sasha moved to Oregon in 2013 to study medicinal plant ecology and her current research centers the dyes, medicines, and life histories of fire-adapted shrubs. She is interested in how dominant understandings of landscape fire can be expanded through the forms—both social and ecological—that fire creates. Sasha studied printmaking and book arts at Bowdoin College, Maine College of Art, and Cranbrook Academy of Art, and has held fellowships at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy and the Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio. She co-founded the Eugene-based Fuel Ladder art research group and more recently co-organized the pilot Artists-In-Fire residency program while a research fellow with the interdisciplinary Confluence Lab. Sasha holds a master’s degree in Environmental Studies from the University of Oregon and a PhD in Environmental Science from the University of Idaho.