About the
Textile Anthropologist
About Me
Hi, I’m Sara—the Textile Anthropologist.
I’m an apparel designer and environmental anthropologist exploring the relationships between textiles, people, and the landscapes that sustain them. My work brings together material culture, ecology, and traditional textile knowledge, with a particular interest in how textile traditions can contribute to both cultural revitalization and ecological restoration.
I’m currently pursuing a PhD in applied anthropology, where my research looks at the ethnobiology of textiles and the ways traditional textile practices can help us imagine more resilient relationships between culture, craft, and the natural world.
Through research, writing, and teaching, I share these stories and explore what textiles can teach us about the places we come from—and the futures we want to create.
My Mission
As the Textile Anthropologist, my mission is to cultivate public textile literacy: a deeper understanding of cloth as an essential part of human life. Textiles are so ordinary and ever-present that it’s easy to overlook the labor, resources, knowledge, and generations of skill within them.
I want to make those stories more visible. By looking closely at how textiles are made, used, valued, preserved, and discarded, we can begin to answer larger questions about culture, consumption, craft, environment, and our relationships with one another.
Whether it’s an Indigenous weaving tradition, a backyard dye plant, or a scrap of fabric tucked away in a museum archive, every textile offers a thread of connection—to people, place, knowledge, and history. My work is about following those threads, and inviting others to follow them too.
