Director of Education (Consulting)
Ashley Eden Kessler grew up in Hancock Park, Los Angeles. She learned from a young age there were two valuable things to do with a life’s work: help people, and make useful objects of beauty. Ashley went on to study architecture and sculpture at Sarah Lawrence and began her professional career in film. She was drawn to fields that required the dual skills of creativity and practicality. An unexpected injury and the subsequent recovery propelled her towards a very different discipline that grounded her in her physical senses. She began as an apprentice to a respected niche perfumer. In 2010, Ashley moved to Grasse, France to pursue a formal perfumer’s education.
In perfumery Ashley found massive liberation, a realm where trekking back from failure and bad ideas was routinely integral to success. At the prestigious Grasse Institute of Perfumery, she distinguished herself with her final brief, winning a coveted award. After the conclusion of her studies, she moved to New York City to work as a Perfumer’s Assistant at Drom Fragrances International and Mane et Fils.
She later returned to Los Angeles and opened Studio Sentir, a private label fragrance lab. Ashley’s compositions are marked by refinement, complexity, boldness, and the quality of completely inhabiting and furthering clients’ ideas.
In 2012 Ashley met Saskia Wilson Brown, the founding director of the Institute of Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles. As a non-profit, the IAO’s mission is to create access to perfumery for the public and to promote multi-disciplinary arts collaborations with an olfactive component. Ashley was offered the position of Perfumer in Residence and during that time she began teaching and building out an educational curriculum with the team. Ashley designs and teaches classes on accords, material evaluation, fragrance families, and the sensory intersection of mindfulness and a perfumery practice.
Ashley’s work has led her to develop a philosophy about perfumery as a dynamic art and reflective practice. In sharing this approach with students, she fulfills her childhood credo: offering tools for others to confront their fears, counter their tendencies, and learn to observe themselves in pursuit of the unknown.
Studio Sentir is located in a historic cottage behind Ashley’s childhood home, a place where she still invokes the play and magic she found there so many years before.
You can contact Ashley at ashley[@]artandolfaction.com