Rae French was raised in Northeast Texas, where they spent much of their childhood wandering outside, touching and tasting it all, and sharing their findings through drawing, song, and story. From a young age, they have been keenly tactile and interested in people's relationship to their surroundings and the natural world. 

French's love for visual arts, desire to write critically, and interest in human history led them to pursue a BFA in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Their interest in people's relationship to place persisted, culminating in Honor's thesis, which explored the disruption and reclamation of urban public spaces as both creative practice and political praxis.

After receiving their Bachelor's, French relocated to New York City, where they began working as an art teacher in Brooklyn public schools. Soon after, a pursuit of more manual work and a standing interest in cultural foodways led them to work as a brewing apprentice at a traditional Korean rice winery where they more intimately learned biochemical processes, grain structure, historic fermentation methodologies and botanicals, and the deeply political trajectories of domestic brewing practices. Increasingly invested in histories of human-plant interaction and cultures' relationships to regional ecologies, they moved on to an NSF-funded position with the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium, where they assisted in the curation and preservation of the institution's biocultural collections through specimen digitization and transcription of traditional, locale-specific uses of plants once collected for pharmaceutical and ethnobotanical research.

French is a first-year master's student in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of New Mexico, under the advisement of Ronda Brulotte. French will be researching the impacts of the commercial alcohol industry on regional biodiversity and the challenges it poses to traditional fermentation practices' relationship to terroir and ecological stewardship.