Sarah Bird

Sarah Bird is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers on trees — their temporalities, their relationships, and what they might teach us about living differently on a changing planet. Working across photography, projection, animation, and installation, she investigates the entanglements between humans and the plant world at scales both intimate and monumental.

Bird holds a PhD in Film and Digital Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she was a Fellow of the Climate Action Lab. Her dissertation, Redwood World-Making Strategies: Art + Arboreality, develops a framework of tree relationality as both a lens for ecological thinking and a method for art practice. She is also a Scholar-Artist Fellow at Justus Liebig University's Graduate Center for the Study of Culture in Gießen, Germany, where her installation Entangled Arboreality is on ongoing view.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the 2016 Venice Biennale, and her 2018 320-foot crime scene outline of a redwood tree at the UN Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco brought the true scale of climate destruction into public space. Recent projects include Being/Tree, a public art installation in downtown San Francisco; two site-responsive projection works for the annual Project/Project series curated by Susie Nielsen of Farm Projects in Wellfleet, MA — Trees in Place, a Strategy for Noticing (2024) and The Duration of Shadows (2025); Arboreal Alchemies in Mill Valley (2026); and Affective Ocean in Block Island, RI (forthcoming 2026). Her work is featured in Giants Rising (dir. Lisa Landers, 2024), a documentary about redwoods and their human champions.

Bird holds a BA from Amherst College and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She is based in Mill Valley, CA and Wellfleet, MA.