Sasha Waters Freyer

Sasha Waters Freyer, also known as Sasha Waters, is an American documentary and experimental filmmaker, and educator.

She is professor of Photography and Film at VCU School of the Arts in Richmond, Virginia.

Waters Freyer has produced and directed 18 films, 14 of which originate in 16mm.

With the exception of her first documentary, Whipped (1998), she has edited all of her films, including Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable (2018).

Waters Freyer received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and her MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University in Philadelphia.

Waters Freyer co-produced her first film, Whipped (1998), with Iana Porter.

It is a 16mm documentary portrait of three professional New York dominatrixes.

Whipped premiered at the and screened at the 1998 Chicago Underground Film Festival.

Razing Appalachia chronicled a years-long struggle against the expansion of a mountaintop removal mine by Arch Coal in rural West Virginia.

She began her academic career at the University of Iowa in 2000, teaching there until the end of 2012.

Reviewing the documentary for The New Yorker when it aired on the PBS series Independent Lens in 2003, Nancy Franklin wrote that it was one of three "good examples of what makes public TV valuable. Each one is the product of an individual vision, and each one would be unlikely to air anywhere else."

Waters Freyer has been married to artist, professor and recovery advocate John D. Freyer since 2003 and they have two children.

Chekhov for Children (2010) documents a full-length production of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya that was staged for one night in 1979 at Symphony Space on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Directed by Phillip Lopate, the play's cast and crew were made up entirely of ten- to twelve-year-olds.

Waters Freyer made the film based on her experience of serving as the play's assistant director, at age ten.

It includes archival footage.

Chekhov for Children premiered in the U.S. at the Telluride Film Festival and at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

It was listed as one of the "Best Undistributed Films" of the year in the IndieWire Annual Critics Survey, 2010.

From 2013 to 2019, she served as Chair of the VCU School of the Arts Department of Photography + Film where she is currently a professor.

Her feature documentary Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable screened theatrically and at festivals around the world in 2018.

It 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 South by Southwest Film Festival.

The film aired on the PBS series American Masters in April 2019.

Since 2019, Waters Freyer has been working on a documentary on the artist Bruce Conner and his unfinished film on the gospel group The Soul Stirrers.