SASHA WORTZEL

Sasha Wortzel is an award-winning filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist using video, installation, sculpture, sound, and performance to explore how this country’s past and present are inextricably linked through resonant spaces and their hauntings, particularly along shorelines and bodies of water. Raised in Southwest Florida and based in New York, Wortzel specifically attends to sites and stories systematically erased or ignored from these regions’ histories. Wortzel is a recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2023 MacDowell Fellowship, 2020 Oolite Arts Ellies Award, and 2017 NYFA Fellowship. Wortzel received an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College. Her films have screened at MoMA DocFortnight, CPH:DOX, True/False, Hot Docs, San Francisco International, New Orleans Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her expanded cinematic work has recently been exhibited at the New Museum, The International Center for Photography, The Kitchen, and the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery. RIVER OF GRASS (2025) is her first feature documentary. The film was awarded the Hot Docs Joan VanDuzer Special Jury Prize - International Feature Documentary and Special Jury Mention at Sarasota Film Festival. The film received institutional support from Sundance, Ford Foundation, Sandbox Films, Knight Foundation, Doc Society, Field of Vision, and Chicken & Egg Pictures. 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 and is in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum of Harlem. Her artwork is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, , 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.