Sasha Wortzel is an award-winning filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist using video, installation,sculpture, and sound to explore how past and present are inextricably linked through resonant spaces and their hauntings. 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 in Film-Video. Her films have screened at venues world-wide including atMoMA DocFortnight, CPH:DOX, True/False, Margaret Mead, San Francisco International, and Dokufest.
Her expanded cinematic work has been exhibited at the New Museum, The International Center for Photography, The Kitchen, and the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery. Her debut feature documentary RIVER OF GRASS (2025) won the Pare Lorentz Award from the International Documentary Association, Hot Docs Joan VanDuzer Special Jury Prize - International Feature Documentary, and Mead Audience Award, among others. Wortzel has 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 participated in residencies at MacDowell, Fine Arts Work Center,ISCP, and Artists in Residence in the Everglades (AIRIE). Wortzel has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America. She is Assistant professor of Film and Electronic Media at Bard College.
(This show originally aired on WGXC on Sunday, May 10th, 2026.)
