Sasha Waters Freyer is an American filmmaker and a Professor of Film and Art Foundation at the #1 Public Fine Arts School in the country, Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 1998, Sasha has produced and directed 17 documentary and experimental films, 13 of which originate in 16mm. With the exception of her first documentary, she has edited of all of her films. Embracing a personal, artisanal approach to craft, she also served as the cinematographer, primarily in 16mm, and sound editor, on ten of them. Trained in photography and the documentary tradition, Sasha's films explore outsiders, misfits and everyday radicals. Her most recent feature documentary, , screened theatrically and at festivals around the world in 2018; was called one of the year's best by The New Yorker's Richard Brody, and won a Special Jury Prize in the Documentary Competition at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival. Winogrand aired on the PBS series American Masters in April 2019. Her new film, in partnership with Producer Henry Rosenthal, “Untitled Bruce Conner/ Soul Stirrers” documentary, recently received critical development support from the Catapult Film Fund.
Life & Career
Sasha Waters Freyer was born in Brooklyn and received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in 1991. She moved from photography to filmmaking shortly after graduation, working for Michael Almereyda, Hal Hartley and Barbara Kopple, among others. While working for Kopple, Sasha met Iana Porter with whom she founded the New York production company Emotion Motion Pictures, Inc. and co-produced her first film, Whipped, a 16mm documentary portrait of three professional New York dominatrixes. Whipped was funded in part by Sub Pop Records; was selected for the first ever Sundance Independent Producers conference, and aired nationally on the Sundance Channel in the early 2000s. Sasha earned her MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University in 1999, where she studied with experimental filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Rea Tajiri. Her film Razing Appalachia, which chronicled a years-long struggle against the expansion of then the nation’s largest strip mine in rural West Virginia, aired on the PBS series Independent Lens in 2003. Razing Appalachia was the first feature documentary film about the environmental and social costs of mountaintop removal mining and has since screened in more than 30 countries globally. Writing in The New Yorker, Nancy Franklin said of Razing Appalachia that the film was a “good example of what makes public television valuable.” Razing Appalachia earned awards at several U.S. film festivals including the Vermont International Film Festival, the EarthVision Environmental Film Festival and the Rural Route Film Festival and is distributed by . In 2000, Sasha accepted a position teaching Film & Video at the University of Iowa, where she met her husband, media and social practice artist John D. Freyer, and created, over several years, a series of personal experimental films that have screened widely in the U.S. and abroad, including at the Tribeca Film Festival; Big Sky Documentary Film Festival; Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival; IMAGES in Toronto; Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cinema Latinoamericano in Havana, Cuba; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and Chicago Underground Film Festivals, winning awards in the experimental film category from the Onion City Film Festival in Chicago, the Black Maria Film Festival and the Humboldt International Short Film Festival. Her 2010 documentary Chekhov for Children, premiered in the U.S. at the Telluride Film Festival and internationally at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Chekhov for Children was listed as one of the Best Undistributed Films of the year in the IndieWiRE Annual Critics Survey, 2010. While Sasha's films screen primarily in festival/museum black box spaces, she has also shown in galleries including LAXART, West Hollywood; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn; Manifest Destiny, Barcelona, and Terrault Contemporary, Baltimore, among others. Her experimental film was included in the 2013 Senses of Cinema World Poll; Our Summer was also included on the Cinefile "Best of the Decade" list, along with her experimental shorts An Incomplete History of the Natural World, 1965 and dragons & seraphim. In 2013, Sasha left the University of Iowa to serve as the Chair of the at VCUarts in Richmond, VA, where she currently teaches BFA and MFA students working in photography, film and media installation.
Awards & Recognition
Sasha Waters Freyer is the recipient of a 2019-20 Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and recipient of the Orphan Film Symposium’s 2016 Helen Hill Award, honoring the legacy of artist, educator and activist Helen Hill. Other grants and awards include Best in Show at New Waves, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art ; Director’s Citation, Black Maria Film Festival ; Media Arts Production Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2015 and 2007; the Derek Freese Documentary Film Fund; the ; the ; the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; The Jacqueline Donnet Fund; The Lucius & Eva Eastman Fund; The Skaggs Foundation, and the . Sasha has been a Fellow at , , and the . Her films have been the subject of feature reviews in ArtForum, Mother Jones, Variety, IndieWIRE, Film Threat, The New York Times,The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, VICE, The New Yorker and Filmmaker Magazine,among others. Sasha is included in , a survey of women who "invented, developed, fine-tuned and revolutionized the art of film editing". She is also included in the , an ongoing collective archive of interviews with feminist experimental filmmakers collaboratively launched by filmmakers Irene Lusztig and Julie Wyman.
