Sasha Waters is a moving image artist and Professor of Film at Virginia Commonwealth University, the number one public college of art and design in the United States. Since 1998, she has produced and directed twenty documentary, experimental, and essay films, most of which originate in 16mm. Embracing a personal, artisanal approach to craft, she served as cinematographer and sound designer on twelve of her films and as editor on all but one.
Sasha’s most recent feature documentary, Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable, 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” in the Documentary Competition at the SXSW Film Festival. Following its theatrical run, Winogrand aired on the acclaimed PBS series American Masters. Since 2022, she has completed three short 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. Ghost Protists had its US festival premiere at the New Orleans Film Festival in October 2024. Her 2022 short essay film Fragile premiered at the Festival ECRÃ in Rio de Janeiro, and has screened at juried venues in Taipei, Saigon, Cesena, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Cambridge. In 2023, Waters completed a short film, We Are About to Commit a Felony, that is part of a larger Abortion Clinic Film Collective series.
Sasha is a three-time recipient of Media Arts grants from the National Endowment of the Arts; her films have been supported through many grants and residencies. Sasha holds a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA in Film & Media from Temple University. She is currently in production on a documentary portrait of the poet Mary Oliver.