Sarah Bird

Sarah Bird is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice takes trees as media, mediators, material, and method, asking what arboreal ways of being might teach humans about belonging to a complex, diverse biotic community. Working across photography, projection, animation, and installation, she draws on the specific qualities of trees including their durational temporality, their capacity for transmutation, their radical interdependence, as both the subject and the generative force of her work.

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 "arboreality" as both a conceptual framework and artistic methodology, reading the specific qualities of coast redwoods as a guide for ecological thinking and practice. She is 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 at the UN Global Climate Action Summit brought the true scale of climate destruction into public space. Recent projects include Being/Tree, a public art installation at the San Francisco Ferry Building; two site-responsive projection works for the 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); At the Pace of Sap Rising (2026), a participatory performance with students and a sugar maple at Brandeis University; 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, 2025), a documentary about redwoods and their human champions, distributed nationally on PBS.

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.