Who Is This Now?

Maggie Ryan Sandford (she/they) is a naturalist, author, media maker, and museum exhibit developer using science and art to teach humans about the world and each other. If her work makes you say, “Oh my gawd I will never forget that as long as I live,” she has done her job.

More specifically…

She develops museum exhibitions and visitor experiences, science and otherwise, including the recently revamped “Discover Wolves” exhibition at the International Wolf Center, the Saint Paul Saint’s “City of Baseball Museum,” Victoria the T. rex, and Where Do We Go from Here?, a COVID-19 exhibition at the Gates Foundation Discovery Center. Whether the job calls for humanizing complex science or helping humans tell their own stories, Maggie’s on it.

She has worked in a variety of TV and film media. Her NASA-funded planetarium show addresses issues of accessibility and inclusion by teaching about the biology of humans in space. Her video work for Nature magazine explores how emotions can get in the way of scientific understanding. She wrote and directed the award-winning exhibition film Victoria the T. rex. Other production credits include work for the Food Network, National Public Radio, and an interactive, multimedia documentary for Twin Cities Public Television, the Association for Independents in Radio (AIR), and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

She is the author of a book about evolution and genetics, Consider the Platypus: Evolution through Biology’s Most Baffling Beasts (Black Dog & Leventhal/Hachette, 2019), which is a hit among folks ages four to 104, got great reviews by the Wall Street Journal and Ars Tecnica, and was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award in the category of General Nonfiction.

More of her science writing has appeared in Smithsonian, Slate, Nature, National Geographic, ComedyCentral.com, the Onion/A.V. Club, mental_floss, and on TV and radio. Her fiction has a appeared in publications including Paper Darts, Revolver, the Indiana Review, McSweeney’s Book of Politics and Musicals, and earned the semi-annual Richard Hugo House Founders’ Award and first place in Literary Death Match 100 and Write Fight #1.

Previously, she was a research and evaluation associate at the Science Museum of Minnesota, doing science about how people learn about science. Research affiliations include the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, Purdue University, the University of Notre Dame, and the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network (NISE).

And in another life, she performed her work at Joe’s Pub, the Guthrie Theatre, People’s Improv Theater, Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, Rififi, the Seattle Poetry Festival, the Walker Art Center, the Wheeler Centre’s “Interrobang: A Festival of Questions”, Rockstar Storytellers, and for All Things Considered, A Beautiful World, College Humor, Kevin Kling’s Storycraft, NPR’s Story Forms, and various podcasts including Stephen Dubner’s Tell Me Something I Don’t Know and Regret Labs.

Maggie would love to talk to you, any time, about so many things but especially your relationship with science. And/or radical imagination as means to collective liberation. And/or cetaceans. Please drop a line.