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

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.

The development of Sasha's work for this exhibition was generously supported by the University of Idaho's Confluence Lab, Department of English, Graduate and Professional Student Association (GPSA), and JC Smith Memorial Fund; it also benefited from a studio assistantship at Penland School of Craft and an awarded residency at PLAYA.

Michelle Robinson is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Los Angeles. She studied environmental design, animation, and visualization at Texas A&M University, producing short films shown at the Walker Art Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, and The AFI National Video Festival. She has 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. Michelle completed her MFA in Visual Art at the New Hampshire Institute of Art and exhibited her thesis work at the Sharon Arts Center in Peterborough, NH, in 2019. Her work has been published in Fiber Art Now, Precog, Frames, and the book Desert Forest, produced by the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, CA. 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 the summer of 2025 at Shatto Gallery.