Sara Jordenö
WHAT DO I DO? HERE IS ONE VERSION:
I came to cinema after many years of working within contemporary art, with a practice informed by institutional critique and relational and social practice. In that world, authorship has long been an open question. In filmmaking, collaboration, the sharing of creative skills, and the negotiations around participation are entangled, and authorship is a frame put in place to support distribution and to make a person professionally legible. The collaborative methods I use differ from one project to the next. I have come to think of my work as a form of ‘social practice cinema’.
My films grow out of relationships sustained over years. A film is made by many people: those who invite it into their lives, and those who shoot, edit, perform and listen. I don’t think authorship belongs to one person.
However, as authorship is examined and renegotiated, it is sometimes treated as if it doesn’t exist. As Bakhtin reminds us, the artist answers for the work with their life.¹ As a director, even when my voice is not heard, I am still speaking. For Spivak, speech only counts if the structure lets it be heard.² I owe honesty about how I use my voice, and about what I choose to keep, so others can answer.
The work doesn’t end when the film does. Every situation is different. I keep coming back to the question: what is a filmmaker’s job?
¹ Mikhail Bakhtin, “Art and Answerability” (1919).
² Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988).
HERE IS ANOTHER VERSION OF ME AND WHAT I DO:
Sara Jordenö is a Swedish-born, U.S.-based filmmaker, artist, writer, researcher and curator whose work over 25 years has centered on documentary forms, collaboration, and the ethics of representation. Their practice spans nonfiction and fiction/nonfiction hybrid cinema, installation, public art and site-responsive commissions, creative nonfiction writing, and social science research.
Jordenö works with people to document their lived experiences and bring those experiences into nonfiction cinema, performance, and writing. Each project develops its own methods of collaboration, framing, and presentation, using approaches borrowed from conceptual and social practice in contemporary art. Their relational and research-based practice moves between documentary and fiction, with collaborators participating in how the work is conceived and produced. Their practice extends into imagined encounters, speculative archives, and migration research.
Jordenö directed the critically acclaimed feature documentary KIKI. In 2012, they were approached by Kiki scene community leaders Twiggy Pucci Garçon and Chi Chi Mizrahi to make a film with and about New York City’s Kiki Scene. Co-written with Garçon and made in close collaboration with six members of the scene, the film documents its artistry and the community organizing that sustains it.
KIKI premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and in the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival, where it received the Teddy Award for Best Documentary/Essay Film. The film received the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, among other awards, and Jordenö was nominated for the Film Independent Spirit Truer Than Fiction Award in 2017.
KIKI has been broadcast, streamed, and screened across seven territories, with theatrical distribution by IFC/Sundance Selects in the United States and Folkets Bio in Sweden. The film has been included in hundreds of film festivals worldwide, including IDFA, Sheffield Doc/Fest, BAMcinemaFest, and Outfest, and opened Frameline40 and the 2016 Tempo Documentary Festival.
Ten years after its premiere, KIKI continues to circulate in cinemas, museums, and community settings. Most recently, it has featured in several iterations of Disobedience Archive, curated by Marco Scotini, including The Zoetrope at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), The Open Storage at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen (2025), La Calle at Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires (2025), and Canopy for Broken Time, in dialogue with Raqs Media Collective, at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich (2026).
Jordenö’s second feature, The Swimmer, is a nonfiction/fiction hybrid currently in post-production. The project began in Sweden in 2016, when a young Hazara asylum seeker from Afghanistan asked Jordenö to make a film about him. They remained in contact for seven years, through production and research, before he suddenly disappeared somewhere in Europe. His wish to become a swimmer runs through the film, alongside the asylum decisions that repeatedly interrupt his plans and restrict where he can live.
Working with actor Ahmad Maher, Jordenö returns to the recordings and exchanges that accumulated during those years. Documentary footage meets staged conversations and a play developed in Upstate New York, with Jordenö entering the frame as a participant. Maher’s performance opens a dialogue with the earlier material. The film follows civil society responses to changing, often brutal, asylum policies, connecting support networks in Sweden with present-day organizing against ICE detention and deportation in the United States. Its companion book, Impermanent Passage, extends this inquiry through creative nonfiction.
This work is connected to SECOND FIELD, the interdisciplinary research platform Jordenö co-founded with scholar A. Horning, a collaborator on The Swimmer and the short film Civil Society, in 2011. Their collaborative studies examine migration, changing border regimes, and civil society responses through fieldwork and visual research. Projects have taken the form of films and installations, including Precarious Record, presented at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2018. Their co-authored research has appeared in the Journal of Refugee Studies, European Journal of Social Work, Critical Criminology, and Crime, Law and Social Change.
As a 2026–27 artist-in-residence at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Jordenö is developing site-responsive work on the silences and hidden queer stories in the cemetery’s landscape and archives. The residency also gave rise to Correspondence, imagined and otherwise, a series of letters and conversations with collaborators, teachers, and people Jordenö has filmed over the years.
Their wider body of work includes The Persona Project, a decade-long investigation presented at Moderna Museet and included in the collection of Malmö Art Museum, and Diamond People, which developed across films, installations, and a public art commission. Iterations of Diamond People have been presented at Bildmuseet, the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Malmö Art Museum, and Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Their public and collaborative projects with Twiggy Pucci Garçon include The Reincarnation of Rockland Palace, The Movement Ball at MoMA PS1, and Passé-Présent-Futur at Institut Tessin in Paris.
Recent curatorial projects include Unclaimed Experience, presented at Springs Projects in Brooklyn and Harvard University’s Film Study Center, and Call & Response, a series devoted to Gunvor Nelson, co-curated with Wenhua Shi, Sarah Keller, and Shira Segal and presented at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Brattle Theatre, and the Goethe-Institut in 2025. Devoted to artist collectives and support networks, they co-founded the gallery Signal in 1998 and The Production Unit in 2005 and are a member of the experimental Boston area film collective AgX.
Jordenö has taught graduate and undergraduate students in art and film programs in the United States and Europe for nearly two decades, including at the Rhode Island School of Design and Valand Academy at the University of Gothenburg. Their interdisciplinary courses put nonfiction and narrative filmmaking into dialogue with sculpture, performance, and social science research.
Through Sara Jordenö Projects, they develop commissioned films, public art, and site-responsive moving-image work for cultural organizations and other partners. Recent clients include the Somerville YMCA and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders.
Jordenö received an MFA in Studio Art from UCLA and a BFA from Malmö Art Academy at Lund University. They studied creative writing at Nordens Författarskola Biskops-Arnö and feminist studies at Uppsala University.
Their awards and support include the Edstrandska Stiftelsen Emerging Artist Award, an American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship, and grants from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, IASPIS, the New York State Council on the Arts, Art Matters, the LEF Foundation, and Harvard University. Their films and artworks have been reviewed and discussed in publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Artforum, Film Comment, The Hollywood Reporter, Kunstkritikk, and The Brooklyn Rail.
For more, visit:
The Swimmer
www.swimmerfilm.com
SECOND FIELD
www.secondfield.org
Correspondence, imagined and otherwise
acrossplaceandtime.substack.com
Selected works, commissions, teaching, client projects, and a full CV are available upon request.
For inquiries, please contact sara@jordeno.com, or projects@jordeno.com for Sara Jordenö Projects. You can also follow @sarajordeno on Instagram.