A moving image artist trained in photography and 16mm cinema, my films pursue ecstatic, metaphorical realism from the relations and materials of ordinary life. Creating across a range of forms – feminist experimental, essay, and biography – I illuminate the interior lives of women and mothers and craft portraits of artists and other humans chasing wild dreams and radical futures. This work is shaped by my ardor for archives, buried histories, and poetry. I have no brand; I am here to explore the dark rainbow of time.
Still from This Existence is Material (2003)
The films of Sasha Waters are “nothing short of groundbreaking.” Her deep research into the archives of photographer Garry Winogrand led to a film that challenged and changed the art historical understanding of his legacy, Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable – called one of the year's best by The New Yorker. Winogrand also won a Special Jury Prize for “Best Feminist Reconsideration of a Male Artist” at the SXSW Film Festival, screened theatrically around the world, and inspired Garry Winogrand Archive 1948-1984, her forthcoming book in collaboration with photographer Jeffrey Ladd and Artbook l D.A.P.
Sasha's current works-in-progress include producing and directing a documentary feature on poet Mary Oliver in partnership with American Masters, serving as consulting producer on Kembrew McLeod's doc on a multigenerational family of artists, The Hansen Family, and final post-production on Trouble Don’t Last, a 1980s gospel concert film featuring The Soul Stirrers started, but not finished, by artist Bruce Conner.
Sasha's experimental films, usually shot in 16mm on a wind-up Bolex, embrace a personal, artisanal approach to craft. Since 2022, she has completed three new short essay films that turn an anti-colonial and feminist lens onto the history of photography and cinema – cyanotypes in Ghost Protists, magic lantern glass slides in Fragile, and popular romance in Ashes of Roses. She has had solo retrospectives at Fisura Festival of Experimental Film, CDMX, the Library of Congress, RPM Fest @ The Brattle, Microscope Gallery in NYC, and ADA Gallery in Richmond; as well as screenings at Kassel Dokfest, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; Anthology Film Archives; Pacific Film Archive; the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of the Moving Image; Union Docs; the Speed Art Museum and the Gene Siskel Film Center, among other international venues. Selected festivals include IMAGES in Toronto, the Telluride Film Festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Rotterdam, Tribeca, Ann Arbor, Woodstock, Chicago Underground, Big Sky Documentary, Vancouver International, Traverse Vidéo, and Palm Springs Film Festivals.
Sasha has received support from the Catapult Film Fund, Field of Vision, the Denver Film Society, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Jerome Foundation, and more. Her first film Whipped – a portrait of three dominatrixes in 1990s NYC – was funded in part by Sub Pop Records, selected for the first-ever Sundance Producers conference and aired nationally on the Sundance Channel. Her next film, Razing Appalachia, was the first-ever feature documentary about the devastations wrought by mountaintop strip mining; it aired nationally on Independent Lens and globally as a part of the ITVS television series True Stories: Life in the USA. She has been a fellow at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; was awarded a 2019-20 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, and was the 2016 recipient of the Helen Hill Award from the Orphan Film Symposium.
A professor of Film and Art Foundation at VCU in Richmond, Sasha is included in Edited By: Women Film Editors, a survey of women who "invented, developed, fine-tuned and revolutionized the art of film editing," and in the FemEx Film Archive, an ongoing collective archive of interviews with feminist experimental filmmakers.
Artist Profile in The Observers
Contact: studio@pieshake.com
