Faculty

Profile

Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. His work spans experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, and contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture and diaspora in relation to structural violence. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology in 2017.

His film "At Home But Not At Home" made its World Premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, in January 2020, with a nomination for the Found Footage Award. His follow-up film "Letter From Your Far-Off Country" made its world premiere at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 2020, and was entered into the Ammodo Tiger Shorts Competition at IFFR in 2021. Sanzgiri’s work has been screened extensively at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally, including Sheffield Doc/Fest, IndieLisboa, Punto de Vista, Viennale, LA Film Forum, e-Flux, 25 FPS festival, and has won awards at BlackStar Film Fest, Open City Documentary Festival, Images Festival, as well as Special Jury mentions at the European Media Arts Festival and Iowa City Docs. Sanzgiri was a 2016 resident of the SOMA program in Mexico City, a Flaherty NYC co-programmer in 2020 - 2021, a resident of the Pioneer Works Studio Residency in Spring 2021, an inaugural fellow of Sentient Art Film’s Line of Sight fellowship, and MacDowell Fellow in winter 2021. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, Wave Farm’s Media Arts Assistance Fund, and the Foundation for Contemporary Art. His work has been written about in publications such as Film Quarterly, Art in America, and was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in Filmmaker Magazine’s Fall 2021 Issue.

Sanzgiri is currently working on his first feature-length work, focusing on the bonds of solidarity that developed out of resistance to the Portuguese empire between India and Africa.