M. Leona Godin is the author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness (Pantheon, 2021) and the founder of Aromatica Poetica, an arts and culture laboratory for the advancement of smell and taste. She creates scented/tactile performance journeys that explore the rich potentials of synesthesia and disability aesthetics.
Godin writing has appeared in such venues as The New York Times, O Magazine, Literary Hub, and ARTnews. She has a Ph.D. in English literature, and lectures on multisensory and multimodal approaches to art and accessibility. She was a 2023 NYPL Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellow for her work on image description and photography, and she is a curatorial researcher for the forthcoming Museum of the Blind People’s Movement. She lives with her partner in the lively Lower East Side of New York City.
At MacDowell, Godin worked on her book, Learning to See with AI: On Blindness and Photography. She began her research into iconic photos of anonymous blind people as a NYPL Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellow and will continue this project as the 2025-26 Jean Strouse Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
