Sasha Wortzel

Award-winning visual artist and filmmaker Sasha Wortzel is a graduate of the Integrated Media Arts program at Hunter College. Her work explores the archival and the imaginary, and Wortzel specifically attends to sites and stories systematically erased or ignored. Raised in South Florida and based in Miami and New York City, she uses film, sculpture, and installation to investigate how structures of power shape our lives around race, gender, desire, and landscape.

A recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, Wortzel was a co-writer, producer, and director of the film Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2018), which premiered at Outfest. The film focused on the life and legacy of transgender activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, key figures in the Stonewall uprising.

Wortzel’s work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum of Harlem, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, and Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places. Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art’s DocFortnight, BAMcinemaFest, San Francisco International Film Festival, Blackstar, Wexner Center for the Arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Aspen Art Museum. Wortzel has been supported by the Sundance Institute, the Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, Doc Society, Chicken and Egg Pictures, Art Matters, and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship.