Outsiders, misfits and dark horses fascinate me: poets and children, artists and activists, dead and dying analog media. As a moving image artist, I am committed to a feminist cinema of opposition that re-imagines personal and social histories in the spirit of engagement with an earlier age of radical-romantic image making. Using anachronistic strategies of cinematic collage, I stitch together original 16mm footage, found/archival films, images, music and texts into weirdly lyrical, unsentimental (and hopefully sometimes funny) films that occupy the intersection of intimate experience and public speech; that mine the tension between the subjective, lived experiences of women / artists / mothers with our interior lives of fantasy and projection, mourning and dread. I am here to explore the scary dark rainbow of time.
Since the ‘90s, Sasha Waters has completed 18 documentary, experimental and essay films, 14 of which originate in 16mm. Embracing a personal, artisanal approach to craft, she served as cinematographer and sound designer on ten of these, and as editor on all but one. These films have been exhibited at Kassel Dokfest, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; Microscope Gallery, Vox Populi, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image; Union Docs, the Library of Congress, the Speed Art Museum and the Gene Siskel Film Center, among other international venues. Selected festival screenings 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, and Palm Springs Film Festivals. Her most recent feature, Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable, screened theatrically and around the world; was called one of the year's best by The New Yorker, and won a Special Jury Prize for “Best Feminist Reconsideration of a Male Artist” at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival. She is currently directing and editing a music documentary, Trouble Don't Last, originally filmed in 1984, about the visionary American artist Bruce Conner and the gospel group the Soul Stirrers which received support from the Catapult Film Fund, Field of Vision and the National Endowment of the Arts.
Sasha has completed residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; was awarded a 2019-20 Virginia Museum of Art Fine Arts Fellowship and is the 2016 recipient of the Helen Hill Award from the Orphan Film Symposium. This award honors the legacy of artist, educator and activist Helen Hill and is biennially presented to a filmmaker whose work “celebrates and embodies such things as creativity, self-expression, animation, small-gauge film, homemade movies and all things made by hand, collaboration, generosity, liberal spirituality, activism, love, play, community, and connection.”
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.
Pieshake Pictures is named for a unique culinary delight enjoyed by Sasha's family for many years at the Hamburg Inn No. 2 in Iowa City.
Artist Profile in The Observers
