Discipline: Film/Video – documentary

Sasha Freyer

Discipline: Film/Video – documentary
Region: Richmond, VA
MacDowell Fellowships: 1999, 2002, 2017

"Outsiders, flops and dark horses fascinate me. Poets and children; artists and activists; dead and dying analog media. Whether in a social justice or lyrical mode, my documentaries and experimental shorts explore displacement and invisibility as subject and metaphor."

Sasha Waters Freyer is a moving image artist trained in photography and film whose work occupies the intersection of intimate experience and public discourse. She charts territory unseen in industrial cinema, telling stories from the critical margins of culture, which are, in the words of Wendell Berry, “always freeholds of wildness.”

Following its world premiere at the 2010 Telluride Film Festival, her documentary Chekhov for Children had its New York premiere at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and its international premiere at the 2011 Rotterdam International Film Festival. Her features and experimental short films have screened on the Sundance Channel and nationally on PBS, at the Tribeca, Woodstock, Big Sky, and Ann Arbor film festivals, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, the L.A. Film Forum, and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, among other venues.

Sasha’s films have been reviewed in ArtForum, The New Yorker, Variety, IndieWIRE and Mother Jones; her writing has appeared in Millennium Film Journal, Teachers & Writers Magazine, Ethnos and the Quarterly Review of Film & Video. She is the chair of the department of photography & film at Virginia Commonwealth University, ranked the number one public art school in the United States.

Studios

Mixter

Sasha Freyer worked in the Mixter studio.

Built in 1927–1930, the Florence Kilpatrick Mixter Studio was funded by its namesake and designed by the architect F. Winsor, Jr., who also designed MacDowell's original Savidge Library in 1925. Mixter Studio, solidly built of yellow and grey-hued granite, once had sweeping views of Pack Monadnock to the east. The lush forest has now grown…

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