
Directing
Born August 10, 1961 · Memphis, Tennessee, USA
Lynne Sachs makes films, performances, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany — sites affected by international war–where she tries to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. Supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at 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. The San Francisco Cinematheque recently published a monograph with four original essays in conjunction with a full retrospective of Lynne’s work. In 2012, Lynne began a series of live film performances of Your Day is My Night at St. Nick’s Alliance in Greenpoint, at Proteus Gowanus in Brooklyn, at Maysles Cinema and at the University Settlement. She then screened the completed hour-long hybrid video at the Museum of Modern Art, the Vancouver Film Fest, Union Docs, the New Orleans Film Fest and other venues in Mexico, Argentina and Ecuador. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and The New School and lives in Brooklyn.

Every Contact Leaves a Trace
2025
This Side of Salina
2024

Contractions
2024
The Jitters
2023

Swerve
2022

Figure and I
2021

Maya at 24
2021

E•pis•to•lar•y: letter to Jean Vigo
2021

Girl Is Presence
2020

Film About a Father Who
2020

A Month of Single Frames
2019

¡Despertar!
2018

A Morning with Jack Waters
2018

The Washing Society
2018

Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor
2018

And Then We Marched
2017

Tip of my Tongue
2017

A Year in Notes and Numbers
2017

Day Residue
2016

Starfish Aorta Colossus
2015

Drift and Bough
2014

Your Day Is My Night
2014

Same Stream Twice
2012

Sound of a Shadow
2011

Wind in Our Hair
2010

The Task of the Translator
2010
Cuadro por cuadro
2009

Georgic for a Forgotten Planet
2009

The Last Happy Day
2009

XY Chromosome Project
2007

The Small Ones
2006

Atalanta: 32 Years Later
2006

Noa, Noa
2006

States of UnBelonging
2006

Investigation of a Flame
2002

Tornado
2002

First Steps in a Terra Incognita
2002

Photograph of Wind
2001

Window Work
2000

A Biography of Lilith
1997

Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam
1994

The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts
1991

Sermons and Sacred Pictures
1989

The Randy Band Film
1988

Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning
1987

Fossil
1986

Drawn and Quartered
1986

Still Life with Woman and Four Objects
1986

The Tarot
1983

Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home