Institute for Art and Olfaction: Its Origins, Education, and Scent-Based Art

香りを使った表現を学ぶワークショップを描いた、IAOの記事用イラスト

Our world doesn’t stop at buying fragrances

Saskia Wilson-Brown — Nez, 2021

Once you fall in love with perfume, you eventually begin to wonder what lies beyond the bottle. How are materials chosen, and what goes into blending them? Can scent express your own memories and ideas?

The Institute for Art and Olfaction (IAO), a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles, gives that curiosity practical tools and a place to explore. Its activities include laboratory classes in blending fragrance materials, museum performances, collections of perfumes and books, and awards recognizing independent creators. What connects them is an approach that treats scent not as the exclusive domain of experts, but as a medium anyone can learn, experiment with, and use to express themselves.

Essential Information

  • Name: The Institute for Art and Olfaction (IAO)
  • Japanese pronunciation: Insutityūto Fō Āto Ando Orufakushon
  • Founded: September 2012; its first public space opened in February 2013
  • Founder and Executive Director: Saskia Wilson-Brown
  • Organization: A US 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization
  • Address: 932 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012, USA
  • Official website: The Institute for Art and Olfaction

“Olfaction” means the sense of smell. The IAO is neither a perfume brand nor a school devoted solely to professional qualifications. It supports education, experimentation, and artistic practice with scent, creating the spaces and personal connections these require.

Saskia Wilson-Brown and the Origins of the IAO

From Fine Art and Independent Film to Creating with Scent

Born in San Francisco to Cuban and British parents, Saskia grew up between California and Paris. She studied art at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned a master’s degree in fine art at Central Saint Martins in London.

In Los Angeles, she worked in art departments for commercials and music videos, progressing from work on set to production design. She later co-directed the Silver Lake Film Festival and, in 2007, took on international filmmaker relations and development at Current TV. Through screening opportunities and distribution structures, she had been involved in finding ways for independent creators to sustain their work.

Her interest in the perfume industry also included an idea for a documentary. Yet as she researched and tried to learn, she encountered barriers unlike those in film. Information about buying finished work was available, but opportunities to access materials, learn how things were made, and experiment were limited.

What she wanted was less to launch a new bottle of perfume than to find somewhere to learn how to work with scent itself. Questions familiar from independent film, about who gets to create and who has a platform to present their work, had resurfaced in another medium.

From Teaching Herself to Working with Josh Meyer

Saskia initially taught herself perfumery, but eventually needed someone who could offer guidance. Meeting people who shared her interest in expressing concepts and stories through scent became an important turning point.

One was Josh Meyer of Imaginary Authors. An Artbound report from June 2013 describes how he became an adviser and collaborator. At the time, the IAO occupied a space on the eleventh floor of the L.A. Mart downtown, somewhere between a laboratory, a classroom, and an artist’s studio.

For an early public project, “Cult,” Meyer, filmmaker Mark Harris, and the IAO worked together. Rather than aiming solely for something pleasant, they presented an intense, overwhelming scent as an artwork. The same tools used to develop a new commercial perfume could also be used to ask different questions.

Finding Josh made all the difference

Saskia Wilson-Brown — Artbound, 2013

What matters here is that not everyone began as an expert. Saskia built a structure in which knowledgeable people could meet others bringing ideas from different disciplines. A lack of knowledge became a starting point for learning rather than the end of participation.

The Vision of the 2012 Founding Statement

The founding statement of September 2012 set out a vision of connecting members of the scent-using public with perfumers and creators from other disciplines, and providing public education and a laboratory. Its Pacific Coast location was part of that thinking. Saskia saw Los Angeles as a city where cultures from Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere intersected and new combinations could emerge.

The IAO’s concern was not the existence of European perfume culture. It was the way that culture could be treated as representing scent culture as a whole, obscuring knowledge from other places and the expression of people outside the industry.

By 2021, its commitment to supporting people who wanted to create their own spaces for working had become more explicit. Alongside careers at companies, it sought to expand opportunities for small-scale independent practice and scent-based art. To do so, it opened the tools of production to people who had previously been consumers of fragrance.

Public Spaces and an Expanding Range of Activities

The first public space opened in February 2013, followed later that year by Open Sessions. Offering direct access to fragrance materials and opportunities to blend them, these sessions remain a central IAO program. In 2015, the institute moved to Chung King Road in Chinatown.

Beyond its own premises, it staged a scent performance at the Hammer Museum in 2014. The Art and Olfaction Awards, established in 2013, held their first ceremony in April 2014. The founding of the organization, creation of the awards, and first awards ceremony were separate events.

The Experimental Scent Summit began in Berlin in 2017. Working with Klara Ravat’s Smell Lab, it developed into a forum where artists and researchers working with scent could share their practices. It took place online in 2020, in Lisbon in 2024, in Los Angeles in 2025, and in Athens in 2026. Judging award entries and gathering to exchange creative work and research serve different purposes.

The People and Operations Behind the Nonprofit

Reinvesting Class Income and Community Support in Future Activities

The IAO’s nonprofit status does not mean every class is free. Participation fees for classes and events, together with donations and other support, sustain its activities, with income reinvested in its programs. Its official support guidance lists attending classes and events as the first way to help keep the organization going.

In 2021, Saskia emphasized developing projects at a workable scale and gathering small contributions from the community, rather than relying solely on pursuing support from corporate marketing departments. Sustaining an independent creative space requires attention to the scale of its operations as well as its ideals. The IAO’s work also reflects challenges she encountered in film and visual art.

Educators from Different Disciplines

Alongside Saskia, the current team includes Director of Programs Minetta Rogers, Director of Projects Julianne Lee, Director of Education Ashley Eden Kessler, and laboratory manager Daniel Krasofski.

Minetta studied cultural anthropology and gained experience in architecture and design. When teaching beginners, she combines hands-on experimentation with research-informed thinking. Rather than simply requiring students to memorize terminology first, she makes smelling materials, testing ideas, and revising them part of the learning process.

The IAO promotes accessible education and experimental uses of scent beyond traditional appreciation and use. Minetta’s programming also includes engagements that bring scent together with literature and performance.

Making Scent a Medium for Art and Experiment

A Journey to Japan Through Scent at the Hammer Museum

“A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes, Revisited,” presented in January 2014, offers a clear example of the IAO’s collaborative practice. Taking its cue from a scent performance attempted by Sadakichi Hartmann in the early twentieth century, it reimagined a journey from contemporary Los Angeles to Japan.

Sherri Sebastian created the fragrances for six scenes: an airport shuttle, an airplane, Narita, Tokyo, a hotel, and a dreamscape. Blindfolded audiences experienced scent, sound, and live Foley effects. Eric Vrymoed and Kamil Beski were responsible for the scent-delivery apparatus, while Bennett Barbakow and others created the sound world.

Narita’s scene was clean and neutral; Tokyo shifted toward an electric impression of neon; and the hotel introduced a rich atmosphere using orange blossom. These were not recordings of odors collected directly from each city, but compositions designed to convey particular moments in a journey.

they work together to create the sense of a moving, changing experience.

Sherri Sebastian — Los Angeles Magazine, 2014

Instead of completing a single perfume, the work created a sense of time through the sequence and transition of scents. Collaboration between the perfumer, apparatus makers, and sound artists expanded scent’s role from something worn on the body to a means of moving a performance forward.

Layering a City’s Scents Through Visitors in “Sillage”

On June 28 of the same year, 2014, Brian Goeltzenleuchter and the IAO presented “Sillage” at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, a participatory work representing Los Angeles neighborhoods through scent.

Before the event, the artist surveyed people about the smells they associated with different neighborhoods. At the museum, visitors received the scent corresponding to their neighborhood on their left wrist. As people gathered and moved, the fragrances overlapped, allowing a geography of the city to emerge within the space.

Participants were not simply an audience evaluating finished fragrances. Through their bodies and the places they lived, they helped constitute the work. The collaboration’s significance lay in translating impressions of neighborhoods into fragrance materials and then presenting them through encounters between people.

From Sharing Formulas to Collections of Books and Perfumes

Launched in 2018, Open Source Smell Culture aimed to broaden access to knowledge by sharing formulas and information about materials. Its collaboration with Mediamatic in Amsterdam included collectively editing information and discussions of scent and intellectual property. The program operated under that name from 2018 to 2024, and its information and work have since been carried forward through library and collection activities.

Meanwhile, IAO Collections, which developed in earnest in 2021, has organized books, perfumes, printed materials, and documentation relating to scent-based works. A major impetus was the bequest of more than a thousand perfumes from perfume-culture writer Connor McTeague. Volunteers documented this donation alongside the existing holdings.

According to the official information available in October 2026, the collection contains more than 1,630 perfumes and over 720 books and artists’ publications. These holdings allow twentieth-century perfumes, everyday material culture, and experimental expression to be considered together. Learning about this alongside preservation and reconstruction from original formulas at the Osmothèque reveals that there is more than one way to preserve perfume culture.

The Role of the Art and Olfaction Awards Within the IAO

Established in 2013, with the First Ceremony in 2014

The Art and Olfaction Awards are an IAO program intended to draw international attention to independent, artisan, and experimental practices in scent. They are not awards through which a separate accreditation body evaluates the IAO: the institute itself runs them.

Established in 2013, the awards held their first ceremony in April 2014. Subsequent editions expanded beyond Los Angeles to cities including Berlin, London, and Amsterdam. A golden pear trophy has become their symbol.

The Difference Between Artisan and Independent

The two categories are not distinguished simply by handmade versus industrial production. Under the current rules, the artisan category requires, among other conditions, that the perfumer who originally wrote the formula own or co-own the brand, with an ownership stake of at least 35 percent. Outsourcing production scale-up or bottling does not in itself automatically disqualify an entry.

The independent category covers brands that establish the creative direction and commission an outside perfumer or fragrance company to create the formula. It also imposes ownership requirements, including private ownership. In judging, the categories distinguish between brands operated by their perfumers and those developed in collaboration with external specialists.

Judging Scents Without Revealing Names

The artisan and independent categories use anonymous samples and a short creative statement in three rounds of judging. By withholding information such as the brand, perfumer, country of origin, price, and marketing, the process aims to focus attention on the work rather than its reputation.

The Sadakichi Award, which recognizes experimental scent-based work, instead requires supporting materials such as exhibition photographs, video, or sound to help judges understand the work. This category is not judged anonymously. The distinction between comparing perfume liquids and understanding a complete work that includes scent is reflected in the selection methods.

The awards help work find an audience; classes provide a place to begin making; and the summit offers a forum for sharing practice. Understanding these distinctions makes clear that the IAO does more than assemble award-winning works. It creates multiple entryways through which creative work can begin, continue, and reach the wider world.

How Perfume Enthusiasts Can Take Part

Visiting and Making Fragrance in Los Angeles

As of October 2026, the IAO is based on pedestrian-only Chung King Road in Chinatown. Public hours for fall 2026 are Fridays from 1 to 5 p.m. and selected Saturdays, with free Open Hours listed on the official calendar. Outside these hours, visits are possible by attending events or arranging an appointment by email.

For those starting to make perfume, beginner classes such as Introduction to Perfume Blending provide an entry point. In Julianne Lee’s Freestyle class, participants learn about natural and synthetic materials, dilution, and recording formulas. They select materials and adjust their blends to produce a small spray sample, exploring the perfumer’s organ, a workstation stocked with fragrance materials, with their own noses.

Open Sessions distinguish between first-time and returning participants and require advance registration. Sessions for returning students are designed as time to develop individual formulas and learn alongside others. As materials provided and experience requirements vary by session, beginners should read the individual listing rather than choose by title alone. Age requirements should also be checked.

Online Activities Accessible from Japan

Online classes cover the understanding of materials and the creation of accords, as well as history and culture. An accord is a combination of materials that creates a single olfactory impression.

For example, Ashley Eden Kessler’s October 2026 musk class requires participants to purchase materials and complete preliminary blending work. By contrast, Sean Coughlin’s class on ancient Greek perfumes and their makers offers an introduction to historical research. Online participation does not mean every class requires the same preparation.

Registration proceeds from individual events on the official calendar to Eventbrite. Information about materials and preparation is included in the registration confirmation email, while Zoom details for online classes usually arrive 12 to 24 hours before the start. Recordings are advertised as being available to registered participants for seven days after the class. Check the time difference with Japan, since event times are based on local time in Los Angeles.

To take part, consult the official events calendar; for visiting information, see Visit. For individual inquiries, contact hello@artandolfaction.com. It helps to plan separately for free public visiting hours and paid, reservation-based making classes.

Encountering the IAO adds the pleasure of choosing materials and considering creative intentions to the enjoyment of discovering perfumes. There is no need to begin by making something to sell. The organization’s distinctive contribution has been to make room for that possibility through tools, education, and connections between people.

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