sara ossana

Originally from Arizona, Sara primarily resides in Rhode Island splitting time between Tucson, AZ and the east coast.  She is a queer identifying creative, committed to a personal legacy interrogating the definition of and reframing the American origin story vis-a-vis the American Southwest through objects, space and material culture. Sara is also an advocate for American design, craft and manufacturing. In using the term ‘American’, this refers to the Americas as a whole, and is not limited by western cartographies, imperial orthographies, country or borders, more commonly referred to as ‘La Frontera’ in the American southwest, and instead is a more dynamic use of the term spanning Indigenous identities, and the queering or radical Jotería & Muxerista expressions.

Sara finds strength and agency in existing on the margins of many disciplines, the edges where the overlap occurs. It is in these spaces of liminality and the edges of uncertainty where the richest collaborations manifest.

She is a Founding Partner and is the former co-owner of O&G Studio for a decade, an award-winning design studio focusing on American-made contemporary furniture with a mission of adding to the collective American Design identity. Her work has garnered International acclaim being featured in the London Design Museum as a Beazley Design of the Year recipient in 2017 and was also a Best of the Year Award finalist with Interior Design Magazine for product design in 2018 and nominated for a Best of Year award by the German Design Council in 2018. She is a member of the New York based Female Design Council and is the Vice President of the Board of Directors at DESIGNXRI a non-profit economic development organization supporting design businesses and entrepreneurs. Sara has been published extensively both domestically and abroad in shelter and design magazines including: The World of Interiors, Architect’s Newspaper, Dwell, The New York Times, Interior Design, Architectural Digest and named one of Ten Contemporary Designers to Collect Today by Vogue.  

She is dedicated to stewarding young designers as a faculty member of both the Furniture Design and Interior Architecture Departments at RISD since 2019. She has also held a full-time faculty position in the Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Department at Brown University in Scenography.

Sara has over 20 years of experience as a world-builder, scenographer, and champion of new works in the theatre and performance ecosystem. She recently was an artist in resident at The Mercury Store in Brooklyn with a piece exploring blackness as performance. She has a long-standing relationship with the Brown Trinity Consortium Graduate Playwrightinig program designing extensively in the workshop and development phases of pieces that have gone on to stages such as Steppenwolf, Playwrights Horizons, and The Public Theatre.

In 2019 she also founded Studio MO, focused on R&D and cross-industry connectivity exploring initiatives balancing business development and social responsibility, the first being re-thinking the Hospice & Assisted Living models drawing focus towards the aging population in society.

Her backgrounds in Interior Architecture, Theatrical Set Design and Furniture & Object Design bring a unique set of tools to her point of view and approach, working comfortably in multiple scales in which objects are imbued with meaning and narrative, blurring the line between furniture, art and space and interrogating the role of narrative in the built environment. . 

She holds a Masters Degree of Interior Architecture from RISD and a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art and English Literature from Rice University.

She splits her time between Rhode Island and Tucson, AZ. In addition to her design career she was also a Division I basketball player and Academic All-American and is proud to be a living index of all oyster bars in the region.

e sara@saraossana.com IG saguaro_haori