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The 2016 Helen Hill Award : Sasha Waters Freyer

For the 10th Orphan Film Symposium, NYU Cinema Studies and the University of South Carolina Film and Media Studies Program, present the 2016 Helen Hill Award to filmmaker Sasha Waters Freyer.

The biennial award honors the legacy of artist Helen Hill and her accomplishments as a filmmaker, educator, and animator. Named in honor of the South Carolina-born artist and citizen of the world who inspired many, the juried award supports independent media artists of exceptional talent whose work embodies Helen Hill’s creative spirit, passion, and activism.

The jury found Sasha's body of self-described work "about outsiders, misfits, and everyday radicals" deeply engaging in style and content. Her films resonate with Helen's in several ways, including their desire to involve children in filmmaking and theater as well as their simultaneous devotion to both social justice and lyrical modes of expression. Sasha's productions also share interests of the orphan film movement, often, as she puts it, "remixing images and sound culled from home movies, educational, and medical films." And they do this while self-aware of how 16mm film and early home video formats work as "dead and dying analog media." (See her website, pieshake.com.)

A maker of more than a dozen film, video, and audio pieces, both experimental and documentary, she chairs the Department of Photography & Film at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Sasha Waters Freyer will introduce a selection of her works for the Orphan Film Symposium's international audience of artists, archivists, scholars, students, curators, collectors, producers, distributors, and others devoted to saving and screening neglected media. The symposium convenes April 6-9, 2016, at the Library of Congress National Center for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia.

Registration is open to all.