Sara is an artist, strategist, and interdisciplinary scholar who explores Indigenous futurities, more‑than‑human kinships, and political imaginaries through research, consulting, teaching, and creative practices.
Sara Maaria Toroi (b. 1992, Kiiminki, Finland) is a karjalaine (Indigenous Karelian), suomalainen (Finn), and naturalized American who dreams of abundant, radically joyous worlds as a visual artist, interdisciplinary scholar, and award-winning teacher, researcher, and activist. Karjalazet (Karelians) know her as Mirjan Akun Sara through relational naming practices.
Her work examines how Indigenous Karelians represent, contest, and reclaim their intergenerational homeland through life writing, oral histories, and archival traces. It explores transcorporeal ecologies of kinship and care with more-than-human beings and intervenes in the political unrecognition of Karelian identity. Through diasporic and ancestral more-than-human kinships, her scholarship articulates pathways toward collectively sown, abundant futures.
Her scholarship has been supported by a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the International Studies Association, an Indigenous politics research grant from the American Political Science Association, and a fellowship with the Summer Institute on Global Indigeneities. Her work has appeared in Biography and SPECTRA (The Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Theory Archives: The ASPECT Journal).
While pursuing her doctorate, Sara has taught courses on alternative futures, environmental politics, and film politics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She served as a Futures Research Fellow with the United Nations Development Programme, advising on strategic foresight and leading futures-thinking workshops. In 2025, she was nominated by her students and awarded the university’s highest honor for graduate teaching.
Outside academia, Sara creates ceramic vessels, has exhibited her work in juried shows, and keeps an active documentary photography practice. She serves on the boards of Artists Talk on Art, Oberon Foundation for the Arts, and the Plan II Honors program at the University of Texas, advising on programming, governance, and strategic initiatives. Sara uses she/they/hän (Karelian and Finnish) pronouns.