M Dougherty

Press

For interviews, images and review visits, contact me or copy .

Coverage

Press kit

Short bio

M Dougherty (they/them) is an artist, perfumer and olfactory researcher working across olfactory art, fine fragrance, research and creative technology. Their work has been shown at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Artpace, Craft Contemporary and Olfactory Art Keller. They are an apprentice perfumer at Mythologist Studio, founder of Signals Olfactive and a former research consultant at The Rockefeller University.

Long bio

M Dougherty (they/them, b. 1991, Los Angeles) is a nonbinary artist, perfumer and olfactory researcher working with scent as a medium. Their practice spans olfactory art, fine fragrance, research and creative technology, and they advocate for olfactory literacy, our ability to perceive, understand and communicate smell.

Dougherty makes installations, performances and instruments for museums and galleries, fine and personal fragrance for brands and individuals, and tools for training and measuring the sense of smell. For six years they were a research consultant at the Vosshall Lab at The Rockefeller University, and they are second author on the 2026 preprint of SMELL-RS, a digital test of human olfaction.

Their work has been shown at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Artpace, Craft Contemporary and Olfactory Art Keller. They teach and speak at universities including RISD, Penn, NYU and Boston University, received the Innovation Award from NYC Media Lab and CHANEL, and served on the board of OSMOCOSM, a global machine olfaction conference hosted at MIT. Dougherty is an apprentice perfumer at Mythologist Studio, founder of Signals Olfactive and writer of Scent Made Digital. They hold an M.A. in Interactive Media Arts from NYU and a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Southern California, and live outside Philadelphia.

Name
M Dougherty
Pronouns
they/them
Portrait
Download, photo by Oliver Jevremov
CV
Read online