Sarah Sense Chitimacha, Choctaw, American, b. 1980

Sarah Sense (b. 1980) was raised in Sacramento, California. Her maternal grandmother is Choctaw from Oklahoma, and her maternal grandfather is Chitimacha from Louisiana. From her grandmother, she gained a love of baskets and an interest in practicing basket weaving herself. With the blessing of the Chairman of the Chitimacha Tribe, Sense began practicing her variation of the traditional method during graduate school at Parsons the New School for Design in 2004. While Director and Curator of the American Indian Community House in New York, Sense cataloged the AICH’s thirty- year history, inspiring her search for Indigenous art internationally. She has since traveled across North America, Central America, South America, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Europe to learn more about the art of Indigenous communities. Landscape photography from her travels is an integral part of her weaving. Sense’s recent exhibitions this year include In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 – Now, Minneapolis Museum of Art, MN; [Un]Mapping: Decolonial Cartographies of Place, Hood Museum at Dartmouth University, NH, and Interwoven Power: Native Knowledge/Native Art, Montclair Art Museum, NJ. Her work is held in private and public collections, including the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, the Portland Museum of Art in Oregon, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.