SASHA WORTZEL

Sasha Wortzel is an artist and filmmaker 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/ 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. The 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, International Center for Photography; Henry Art Gallery, South London Gallery, and SALTS, Birsfelden. Wortzel has been supported by a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, Doc Society, and Chicken and Egg Pictures. She has participated in residencies including MacDowell, Fine Arts Work Center, Silver Art Projects, and ISCP Ground Floor. 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) IDA Awards nominee for best short documentary and currently streaming on Criterion Channel; 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.