Banner image: Sasha Michelle White, “No Man’s Yellow Fire Shirt Project,” Heward, WA

Sasha Michelle White is an artist and interdisciplinary researcher who engages the material ecologies of the Pacific Northwest’s fire-prone landscapes. Her current research focuses on the dyes, medicines, and life histories of fire-adapted shrubs and how these articulate a long-term social relationship with fire. Her work manifests through manual and process-based practices as drawings, garments, poems, and performances, and she is particularly interested in how commonplace notions of fire can be expanded through the forms—both social and ecological—that are generated by fire. 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 earned a master’s degree in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon in 2021, helped found the Fuel Ladder art research group, and, as a Mellon Foundation predoctoral fellow with the interdisciplinary Confluence Lab, initiated the Artists-In-Fire residency program. She is currently a PhD candidate in Environmental Science at the University of Idaho.

Michelle Robinson received her Bachelor of Environmental Design in 1991 from Texas A&M University and continued with graduate studies at Texas A&M’s program in Visualization, producing animated short films that were shown at the Walker Art Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, Imagina in Monaco, and The AFI National Video Festival. She completed her MFA in Visual Art at New Hampshire Institute of Art and exhibited her thesis work at the Sharon Arts Center in Peterborough, NH in 2019. She has had her work published in The Hand, Diffusion of Light, Precog, and Frames. She has exhibited her work in solo shows at LAUNCH LA, the Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder, CO, The Wright Gallery at Texas A&M University, and the Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery at Coker University in NC. She has been awarded residencies with the Joshua Tree Center for Photographic Arts, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, PLAYA, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation. She has juried shows for the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art and Shoebox Projects, and is currently co-curating an exhibition about the Los Angeles River for summer of 2025 at Shatto Gallery.

She has also been an artist and supervisor with Walt Disney Animation Studios for 31 years, most recently serving as Head of Characters on the Oscar-winning Encanto. She has been a mentor in Disney’s Artist Development Program, taught computer lighting and texturing at the California Institute for the Arts, and is a regular visiting instructor at Texas A&M University. She was nominated for a VES award for Animated Character on Wreck-It-Ralph and was named an Outstanding Alumni for the College of Architecture, Texas A&M University, in 2013. She volunteers with several organizations and advisory boards, including Exhibitions Director for International Encaustic Artists, and is a member of the curatorial collective Monte Vista Projects in downtown Los Angeles.