BIO

Simone Lassar (b. 2000, she/her) is a queer Jewish artist living on Ohlone land​ (Oakland, CA), exploring cycles through printmaking, papermaking, and natural pigments. Raised by biologist parents and the Massachusetts mud, a curiosity and connection to the Earth has flowed through her body as long as it has existed.

She received a BS from MIT in 2022 in Environmental Engineering with a minor in Design. Simone’s art reflects many themes of her scientific work: plants, cycles, fish, but is infused with a little more play, magic, and community than science allows.

From 2023 to 2025, she worked as a research engineer and fish keeper for Natel Energy, a hydropower design company, before transitioning to a full-time art practice. In addition to her own art practice, Simone works as a teaching artist and illustrator.

ARTIST STATMENT

My work explores the glitsh, a Yiddish word meaning “the slippery place,” between science and magic. The space where natural processes feel mysterious, transformative, and invite us into curiosity. I explore cycles both thematically and literally, incorporating foraged materials and waste, mirroring natural systems. Creating art about and with the things in my environment allows me to access gratitude for exactly where I am. I look to Joanna Macy’s teachings that gratitude is a revolutionary act; taking stock of what we have and how much we already have access to, in a system that tells us we are insufficient and need more, is liberating.

I think of making is a liberatory force, it has the ability to unbind what’s held within us and to nourish us as we work toward a more just and beautiful world.

Things I would love to connect over include: papermaking with plants, natural pigment finding and foraging, plant walks/identification, group singing, fish stuff, anti-zionist Judaism, love of Sausal Creek, and the pronunciation of the word ichthyology.