Lynne Sachs is a multidisciplinary artist who creates films, performances, installations, and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. Her work is characterized by the integration of poetry, collage, painting, politics, and layered sound design.
Since 1994, Sachs has traveled to various locations affected by international war, including Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, and Germany, to create a series of essay films that examine the space between a community's collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Her films often push the boundaries of cinematic theory and practice, experimenting with the relationship between image and sound to create unique visual and aural textures.
In addition to her work in film, Sachs has collaborated with her partner Mark Street on a series of mixed-media performance collaborations called The XY Chromosome Project, which began in 2006. She has also co-edited the Millennium Film Journal issue on "Experiments in Documentary" and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Jerome Foundations, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts.
Sachs' films have been screened at numerous festivals, including the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and Toronto's Images Festival, as well as a five-film survey at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. A monograph featuring four original essays and a retrospective of her work was published by the San Francisco Cinematheque in 2018.
In 2012, Sachs began performing live film versions of her work, including "Your Day is My Night", at various venues in New York City and beyond. The completed hour-long hybrid video was screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Vancouver Film Festival, Union Docs, the New Orleans Film Festival, and other venues in Mexico, Argentina, and Ecuador.
Sachs is a professor of experimental film and video at New York University and The New School, and she lives in Brooklyn.
