SASHA WORTZEL

Sasha Wortzel uses video, installation, sculpture, sound, and performance to explore how this country’s past and present are inextricably linked through resonant spaces and their hauntings. Raised in South Florida (Miccosukee and Seminole lands) and based in New York City (Lenape lands), Wortzel specifically attends to sites and stories systematically erased or ignored from these regions’ histories. Tangled dynamics of desire and loss layered in the landscape and reverberating across time form a through-line in her work.  

Wortzel’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art’s DocFortnight, CPH:DOX, True/False Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, DOC NYC, BAMcinemaFest, New Orleans Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. Solo exhibitions include Dreams of Unknown Islands at Cooley Memorial Art Gallery with Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR (2022) . Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at the New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, The Kitchen, New York; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and SALTS, Birsfelden. Wortzel has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, Doc Society, Chicken and Egg Pictures, Art Matters, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship. Wortzel has participated in residencies including MacDowell, Silver Art Projects, Smack Mellon, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Abrons Arts Center, Watermill Center, AIRIE (Artists in Residence in the Everglades) and Oolite Arts.

Wortzel’s work 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. Recent films include How to Carry Water (CPH:Dox, 2023); This is an Address (MoMA Doc Fortnight, 2020), distributed by Field of Vision; and Happy Birthday Marsha! (2018; co-director Tourmaline), which won special mention at Outfest and is distributed by Frameline. Wortzel has been featured in publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, and New York Magazine. She received an MFA in integrated media arts from Hunter College.