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Sasha Waters[1][2] also known as Sasha Waters Freyer, is an American documentary and experimental filmmaker, feminist and educator. She has produced and directed twenty films,[3] most of which originate in 16mm and except for her first documentary has edited all of her films. Her films have screened at the Brooklyn Museum,[4] the Museum of the Moving Image, Union Docs[5] and the Gene Siskel Film Center. Selected festivals include IMAGES in Toronto and the Telluride Film Festival.[6] She is also a professor of Photography and Film at VCU School of the Arts in Richmond, Virginia.[7]
Sasha Waters was born in Brooklyn and educated at the University of Michigan and the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she earned her BFA in Photography in 1991.[8] She earned her MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University in Philadelphia.[9]
Waters began her academic career at the University of Iowa in 2000, teaching there until the end of 2012.[10] From 2013 to 2019, she served as Chair of the VCU School of the Arts Department of Photography + Film[11] where she is currently a Professor.
Waters co-produced her first film, Whipped (1998), with Iana Porter. It is a 16mm documentary portrait of three professional New York dominatrixes.[12][13] Whipped premiered at the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, screened at the 1998 Chicago Underground Film Festival,[14] and was called a "likable, low-key demystification of a potentially lurid subject," by Variety.[15]
Waters' second film, Razing Appalachia chronicled a years-long struggle against the expansion of a mountaintop removal mine by Arch Coal in rural West Virginia.[16][17] Reviewing the documentary for The New Yorker when it aired on the PBS series Independent Lens in 2003, Nancy Franklin wrote that it was a good example of "what makes public TV valuable."[18]
Chekhov for Children (2010) documents a full-length production of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya that was staged in 1979 at Symphony Space on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Directed by Phillip Lopate, the play's cast and crew were made up entirely of fifth- and sixth-grade students from P.S. 75. It premiered in the US at the Telluride Film Festival[19] and at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.[20] It was listed as one of the "Best Undistributed Films" of the year in the IndieWire Annual Critics Survey, 2010.[21]
Waters' feature documentary Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable[22] screened theatrically and at festivals in 2018. It was called one of the year's best by The New Yorker's Richard Brody[23] and won a Special Jury Prize in the Documentary Competition at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival.[24] The film aired on the PBS series American Masters in April 2019.[25]
Since 2019, Waters has been working on a documentary on the artist Bruce Conner and his unfinished film on the gospel group The Soul Stirrers titled Trouble Don't Last.[26][27] She has also completed a trilogy of experimental 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.[28]
- Fellow, MacDowell 1999, 2002, and 2017[29]
- Media Arts grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, 2007, 2015, 2020[30][31][32]
- 2016: Helen Hill Award, Orphan Film Symposium[33]
- 2016: Winner, Best in Show, New Waves, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art[34]
- 2018 Special Jury Prize, SXSW Film Festival, for Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable[citation needed]
- 2019–20 Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts[35]
- 2020 Field of Vision grant for Trouble Don't Last[citation needed]
- Whipped (1998), co-produced with Iana Porter – documentary, 60 mins[13]
- This Existence is Material (2003)
- Razing Appalachia (2003) – documentary, 72 mins[16]
- The Waiting Time (2005)
- Her Heart is Washed in Water and then Weighed (2006)
- This American Gothic (2008)
- You Can See the Sun in Late December (2010)
- Chekhov for Children (2010) – documentary[36]
- An Incomplete History of the Travelogue, 1925 (2012)
- Our Summer Made Her Light Escape (2012)
- An Incomplete History of Pornography, 1979 (2013)
- Burn Out the Day (2014)
- A Partial History of the Natural World, 1965 (2015)
- Garden of Stone (2015)
- dragons & seraphim (2017)
- Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable (2018) – documentary[37]
- Respiration (2019)
- Fragile (2022)
- Ashes of Roses (2023)
- Ghost Protists (2024)
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