Sasha Waters began her career working for icons of the '90s film scene in New York: Michael Almereyda, Barbara Kopple, Hal Hartley, and Ang Lee among them. Her academic career began at the University of Iowa in 2000, where she taught until the end of 2012. From 2013 to 2019, she was the Chair of the highly ranked
VCU School of the Arts Department of Photography + Film where she is currently a Professor. Waters co-directed her first film,
Whipped (1998), with Iana Porter. A
16mm documentary portrait of three professional New York
dominatrixes,
Whipped premiered at the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, screened at the 1998 Chicago Underground Film Festival, and was called a "likable, low-key demystification of a potentially lurid subject," by
Variety. Writing about the film in
The New Yorker when it aired on the PBS series
Independent Lens in 2003, Nancy Franklin wrote that it was a good example of "what makes public TV valuable." Waters' 2010 film
Chekhov for Children documents a full-length production of
Anton Chekhov's
Uncle Vanya staged 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 5th and 6th grade students from P.S. 75 on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
Chekhov for Children premiered in the US 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. Sasha Waters' feature documentary
Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable screened theatrically and at festivals in 2018, 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
SXSW Film Festival. The film aired on the PBS series
American Masters in April 2019. Since 2022, Waters has completed a trilogy of experimental short films that turn an anti-colonial and feminist lens onto the history of photography and cinema – cyanotypes in
Ghost Protists, magic lantern glass slides in
Fragile, and popular romance in
Ashes of Roses. They have screened at more than sixty festivals, museums and galleries around the world, including the Seattle International Film Festival, Chicago Underground, Festival Internacional de Curtas de São Paolo, and Uppsala Short Film Festival, International Competition. Most recently, Sasha Waters is the Director, Producer and co-Editor of the 2026 feature documentary,
Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, a co-production between Pieshake Pictures and
American Masters. Mary Oliver premiered at the 2026 True/False Film Festival and in New York at DOC NYC Selects. In April 2026, DEADLINE announced that Kino Lorber would theatrically release
Mary Oliver in advance of its PBS broadcast. ==Awards and honors==