Susan Barbour is a poet-scholar, artist, and perfumer whose work explores how sensory attention can reveal hidden forms of connection—both with ourselves and with our natural environments. Working across literature, visual art, performance, and scent, she investigates what we notice, what we overlook, and the altered states of awareness that become possible when attention itself becomes a creative practice.

Susan began her creative practice as a poet, studying literature at Dartmouth before earning an M.F.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins in 2003. Her poems have since appeared in journals and anthologies including The Paris Review, Five Dials, and Oxford Poetry. A self-taught visual artist who began as an artists’ model, Susan learned life drawing “on both sides of the easel,” discovering in the studio a logic that felt intrinsically lyrical. Her visual practice has since encompassed hair drawings, intaglio prints, neon sculpture, conceptual art, performance, and olfactory art.

At Hopkins, Susan studied with the poet-scholar Allen Grossman, who encouraged her to pursue her interest in poetics and literary theory alongside her creative work. Grossman introduced her to Susan Howe, the poet, scholar, and artist who would later become the subject of her doctoral research at Oxford. She continued to publish poetry alongside her scholarship, earning a D.Phil. in English Literature in 2014.

Susan’s path to perfumery began years earlier, during two years spent teaching in France. While eating a botrytized grape in Barsac and listening to the French phrases used to describe its wine, she became fascinated by the relationship between scent and poetic language. The light over that particular hillside, passing through the golden liquid, became an image that still informs the way she thinks about perfume. She began studying wine, eventually earning the WSET Diploma in Wines and Spirits and the French Wine Scholar credential. Training her nose for these rigorous exams inspired her to become the creator—and not just the connoisseur—of complex, multilayered aromatic compositions.

The sense of smell became both an art and a muse. Susan’s performance I Smell Human explores the aromatic signatures of human bodies; her scent walks document the olfactory character of landscapes; and her site-specific fragrances translate architecture and place into scent. In 2023, she brought these investigations to the TEDxRoma stage in a talk about smell, perception, and human connection. She is the founder and perfumer of SUSAN BARBOUR PERFUMES, a collection of fragrances conceived as scent-poems.

Susan has received fellowships and residencies from institutions including the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Dora Maar House, The Siena Art Institute, Castello and the Institute for Art and Olfaction. She has lectured at Johns Hopkins, École Polytechnique, and Oxford, and held research positions at Columbia University and Caltech.