I am an artist, nonfiction filmmaker, writer, theorist, and curator working across nonfiction cinema, experimental film, installation, public art, writing, and research-based practice.
For more than twenty years, I have made films, artworks, and research-based projects concerned with collaboration, testimony, migration, memory, and the ethics of representation. My work often emerges through long-term relationships with communities, performers, scholars, and participants, asking how moving-image practice can become a site of encounter, accountability, and shared authorship.
I directed the award-winning feature nonfiction film KIKI, co-written with Twiggy Pucci Garçon and created in close collaboration with members of the New York City Kiki Scene. The film premiered at Sundance and Berlinale, received the Teddy Award for Best Documentary and Essay Film, and has circulated internationally across cinemas, festivals, streaming platforms, and contemporary art contexts, including the 60th Venice Biennale.
Current projects include The Swimmer, a feature nonfiction film in production/post-production, and Impermanent Passage, a creative nonfiction book in progress. Together, the works explore disappearance, testimony, performance, and the unfinished political aftermath of Europe’s treatment of young asylum seekers after the 2015–16 refugee crisis.
I am also developing new site-responsive work as an artist-in-residence at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge (26/27). Current work includes Exposome, an experimental nonfiction film exploring environmental exposure through the intertwined histories of uranium mining in South Dakota and radioactive fallout in northern Sweden. The project asks how exposure accumulates over time, and how visible and invisible forces shape bodies, relationships, and ways of living.
I have taught for nearly two decades in art and film programs in the United States and Europe, working with students in nonfiction cinema, directing, performance, research-based practice, collaboration, and the ethics of representation. My teaching grows from the same commitments as my films and projects: close attention, experimentation, care, and accountability.
Through Sara Jordenö Projects, I develop commissioned projects, short-form films, public-facing moving-image work, and client-based projects. This work draws on the same cinematic and research-based approach: careful listening, strong visual language, ethical collaboration, and attention to the lived complexity of people, places, and institutions.
For more, visit:
KIKI
www.kikimovie.com
The Swimmer
www.swimmerfilm.com
Selected works, commissions, teaching, client projects, and full CV available upon request.
For inquiries, please contact sara@jordeno.com or follow @sarajordeno on Instagram.
