Artist Talk with Sasha Wortzel

For those of us who live at the shoreline traces a filmmaking practice at the crossroads of nonfiction, fabulation, archival excavation, and poetics. How might film and expanded forms of cinema help us to grieve, dream, and reimagine kinship in the face of ongoing ecological and political collapse?

Sasha Wortzel is an award-winning filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist. Raised in Southwest Florida and based in New York City, Wortzel specifically attends to sites and stories systematically erased or ignored from these regions’ histories. Wortzel is a recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film-Video. Her films have screened world-wide at venues including MoMA DocFortnight, CPH:DOX, True/False, San Francisco International, Hot Docs, Dokufest, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her expanded cinematic work has been exhibited at the New Museum, The International Center for Photography, and The Kitchen, among others. Wortzel is a 2023 MacDowell Fellowship, 2020 Oolite Arts Ellies Award, and 2017 NYFA Fellowship. RIVER OF GRASS is her first feature documentary. The film has received institutional support from Sundance, Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, Doc Society, Chicken & Egg Pictures, and Sandbox Films. Her short films include HOW TO CARRY WATER (2023), an IDA Awards nominee for best short documentary and currently streaming on Criterion Channel; THIS IS AN ADDRESS (2020) distributed by Field of Vision; and HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARSHA! (2018; co-director Tourmaline) which won special mention at Outfest. Her artwork is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum of Harlem, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, and Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places. She has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America.