Sasha Waters Freyer

Sasha Waters Freyer (born November 19, 1968) is an American filmmaker and is the Chair of the Department of Photography and Film at Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2016, she received the Helen Hill Award from the 10th Orphan Film Symposium, honoring the legacy of the amazing artist, activist and educator Helen Hill.

Early career

Waters Freyer was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States, to a first generation Greek-American mother and a father whose family claims the line is descended from The Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, NC. She studied photography at the University of Michigan (1986–1988) and The School of Visual Arts. In 1991, she received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, where she studied with photographers Lois Conner, Thomas Roma and Charles Traub. She moved from photography to moving images shortly after graduation, working for filmmakers Michael Almereyda and Hal Hartley, Barbara Kopple, and television producers Sasha Alpert and Daniel Polin. While assisting on Kopple’s Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson, Waters Freyer met Iana Porter with whom she founded the New York production company Emotion Motion Pictures, Inc, and co-produced her first film, Whipped (1998) a 16mm documentary portrait of three professional New York dominatrixes. Whipped was funded in part by Jonathan Poneman’s and Bruce Pavitt’s Sub Pop Records, Whipped “doesn’t exploit for snarky laughs or soft-core titillation” wrote Variety. Whipped was selected for the first ever Sundance Independent Producers conference, and aired nationally on the Sundance Channel in the early 2000s.

In the late 1990s, Waters Freyer, (credited as “Sasha Waters” until 2003), Worked as an Associate Producer for Mannes Productions and for Elevator Pictures on shows produced for the PBS series The American Experience.

Waters Freyer earned her MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University in 1999, where she studied with Lynne Sachs and Rea Tajiri. Her thesis 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 national feature documentary film about the environmental and social costs of mountaintop removal mining and has since screened in more than 30 countries globally as a part of the ITVS series True Stories: Life in the U.S.A. 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. It has been sold to hundreds of University and community libraries by the distributor of environmental media, Bullfrog Films.

Since 2000

In 2000, Waters Freyer accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of Film & Video at the University of Iowa. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006 and created, over several years, a series of short experimental films that have screened widely in the U.S. and abroad, including at the Tribeca, Big Sky Documentary, Jihlava International 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, the Humboldt International Short Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the San Diego Women’s Film Festival.

In 2006, Waters Freyer reconnected with a childhood mentor, poet, essayist and film critic Phillip Lopate, author of the widely anthologized essay, “Chekhov for Children.” This essay, a comedic recounting of his staging of Uncle Vanya with untrained public school 5th graders in 1979, was the foundation for her feature documentary of the same name, completed in 2010. Following its World Premiere at the 2010 Telluride Film Festival, Chekhov for Children had its New York premiere at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in October 2010 and its international premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in February 2011. Chekhov for Children was listed in the indieWIRE Annual Critics Survey 2010 as one of the Best Undistributed Films of the year and scored a Top Ten mention in the Senses of Cinema 2010 Critics World Poll.

In 2013, Waters Freyer left the University of Iowa for a Chair position at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA, where she currently teaches BFA and MFA students working in photography, film and media installation.

Recent projects

Waters Freyer’s recent and new works include a long-term cycle of short films, loops and projections entitled The Domain of Ghosts, on the cultural and political legacies of the late 20th century. She is also in production on a feature documentary film about American photographer Garry Winogrand titled All Things are Photographable. This film received development support from the National Endowment of the Arts in 2015. Waters Freyer has recently launched a couple of curatorial projects, with an upcoming film program screening at Anthology Film Archives in New York and a mobile art exhibition space she curates at Bust Gallery.

Awards and recognition

Waters Freyer has received a number of grants and fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Arts (2015, 2007); the Graham Foundation (2006); the Jerome Foundation (1999); the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (1999); The Jacqueline Donnet Fund (2001); The Lucius & Eva Eastman Fund (2002); The Skaggs Foundation (2002); the Iowa Arts Council (2002 and 2005). She has been a fellow at The MacDowell Colony (1999, 2002), Yaddo (2004) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2015). Her films have been reviewed in ArtForum, Mother Jones, Variety, IndieWIRE, Film Threat and The New Yorker, and her critical writing has appeared in Ethnos, Millennium Film Journal, Teachers & Writers Magazine and the Quarterly Review of Film & Video.

Personal life

In 2000, Waters Freyer met the interdisciplinary media artist John D. Freyer in Iowa City, IA, when she was producing an audio short, “The Stuff of Life,” for the NPR show Weekend Edition Saturday. They married in 2003 and have two children. She is also the daughter of graphic designer and design educator John Waters and the sister of San Francisco entrepreneur Nell Waters.