Sara Maaria Saastamoinen (hän, she/they) is a karjalaine (Indigenous Karelian), suomalainen (Finn), and naturalized American who dreams of abundant, radically joyous worlds as a multimedia artist, interdisciplinary scholar, and award-winning activist.
Her growing body of work navigates transcorporeal ecologies of kinship and care with the more-than-human beings with whom we share our home planet. Their work articulates diasporic constructions of karjalažus (Karelian identity) toward collectively sown abundant futures. A dissertation completion fellowship from the International Studies Association, an Indigenous politics research grant from the American Political Science Association, and a fellowship with the Summer Institute on Global Indigeneities have supported her research and writing. Sara’s work has appeared in Biography and SPECTRA (The Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Theory Archives: The ASPECT Journal).
While pursuing their doctorate, Sara has taught alternative futures and political science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and served as a Futures Research Fellow with the United Nations Development Programme’s Executive Office Strategy and Futures team. In 2025, Sara was nominated by her students and won the university’s undergraduate teaching award as a graduate student.
Outside of academia, Sara consults for an artist residency nonprofit and creates ceramic vessels. Her art has been exhibited in juried shows in Honolulu, Hawai‘i.
