Pleased to meet you.

Maybe you met me while printing a Monarch Festival poster, or dipping into the indigo vat along a stretch of the Mississippi River, or walking through your neighborhood and talking about trees. My name is Sarah Nassif, and I’m an artist and botanist based in Minneapolis. My work brings together people, the natural world and handcraft to spark new conversations about our connections to nature and how they can help us talk about climate uncertainty, environmental justice, and our shared futures on this planet. Starting with my curiosity about the places we live and our connections to them, I explore nature as a model and inspiration to help access the creativity present in each of us.

I love to connect people to local nature and place history through unexpected collaborative experiences. Exploring a wide range of handcrafts in my collaborative workshops, I draw on my background as a botanist, field researcher, urban forester and environmental educator to create programs that deeply engage and interconnect communities. I build partnerships between local artists and government organizations and design custom workshops for a wide variety of public, private, corporate and non-profit clients.

Building a strong, authentic relationship to the places we live can ground us as neighbors, communities and individuals. And this becomes a foundation for healing, building new connections, and looking toward the future together.

I believe we all have something new to learn and be amazed by each and every day.

—Sarah Nassif

Artist Statement

Observing nature connects us with the landscape in new ways each time. I create interventions that ask people to notice, document and share their experiences with nature. These may be collaborative screenprinting workshops that produce patterns from participants’ tree observations, a self-guided nature foray experience driven by a free field book and pencil, or textiles that put consumers into the role of naturalist-collector. My work uncovers stories of what is growing around us and why, and encourages us to ask one another what meaning that brings to daily life.