About
Photo by Shala Miller
Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles across the Global South. Sanzgiri’s films offer sonic and visual journeys through family history, local mythology, and colonial legacies of extraction in Goa, India—where his family originates—deftly utilizing and vividly blending together 3D renderings, drone videography, photogrammetry and lidar scanning, 16 mm film and animation, archival footage, and desktop documentary practices.
Sanzgiri’s work has been screened extensively at festivals and venues around the world including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Doclisboa, Viennale, Camden International Film Festival, REDCAT, Menil Collection, Block Museum, MASS MoCA, moCa Cleveland, Le Cinéma Club, Criterion Collection, and many more. He has won awards at the BlackStar Film Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, Images Festival, Videoex, and more. Fellowships and residencies include SOMA, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, Sentient.Art.Film’s Line of Sight, and Flaherty NYC. He was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film in Filmmaker Magazine’s fall 2021 issue and was included in Art in America’s New Talent issue in 2022. His work has been written about and conducted interviews with BOMB Magazine, MOUSSE, e-Flux, Film Comment, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, Film Quarterly, SEEN Journal, Dissent, November Magazine, and more.
His first institutional solo exhibition Here the Earth Grows Gold opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include “An Impossible Address” at Mercer Union in Toronto, Canada.