ABOUT SARA

I’ve always been drawn to the places where design and meaning meet: where a pattern isn’t just visual, but structural. My career began in digital design, building brands and platforms at agencies in New York. But even then, I was restless. I wanted to understand how things actually worked before deciding how they should look. I found myself asking about business models, pricing structures, customer behavior. I wanted to see the whole system. I wanted to get into the weeds.

That instinct eventually led me to start MINNA, a home textile brand grounded in values, ethical sourcing, and long-term partnerships with artisans across Latin America. What began as an artistic curiosity became a 12-year journey into what it really means to build an equitable business, and especially, an equitable supply chain, one based in trust, co-creation, and mutual respect. I’ve spent over a decade working closely with artisans, cooperatives, and social enterprises in rural and Indigenous communities, learning the nuances of production, communication, and relationship across borders and systems. This work changed me, and although I’ve now closed MINNA, I’m not done with it.

Now, I carry this work forward through Portals: part studio, part office. It’s a space for exploring pattern, color, and communication through artwork, fabric, and wallpaper as well as a practice for supporting founders and teams through creative direction, brand development, and operational strategy. Portals is intentionally expansive, because that’s how my brain works best. A psychic once told me my mind was like a web on a grid. It was the most accurate description of how I think that I’d ever heard.

I believe pricing is a design decision. I believe strategy is creative. I believe operations should make space for softness, and that queerness offers a powerful lens for imagining new ways of working: nonlinear, relational, experimental.

My art practice runs quietly beneath it all. It’s where I return to questions that don’t always have answers. It’s pattern as thought, shape as language, a kind of visual processing. The work often lives behind the scenes, but it continues to shape everything and anything I do.

I’ve been lucky to have my work recognized along the way, from being named one of Dwell Magazine’s “30 Emerging Talents in the World of Design,” and featured in publications like Architectural Digest, Vogue, and Martha Stewart. But what I’m most proud of is the relationships I’ve built and the values I’ve held onto.

Portals is a container for a way of working. It’s not one thing. And that’s actually the whole point.