About
Photo by Shala Miller
Suneil Sanzgiri’s research-driven practice considers questions of inheritance and indebtedness in relation to histories of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle across the Global South. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work explores image-making, collective memory, and testimony, and are often in dialogue with the works of filmmakers, revolutionaries, and poets, drawing together a slippage between the living and dead. Beginning with an examination of his family’s legacy of resistance in Goa, India, to centuries of Portuguese colonial occupation, Sanzgiri's recent works contend with the possibilities of transhistorical and cross-continental solidarity, wrestling with their own forms to test the efficacy of words and images in times of struggle, mourning, suffering, and action.
His first institutional solo exhibition, “Here the Earth Grows Gold,” opened at the Brooklyn Museum in Fall 2023. Other solo exhibitions include “An Impossible Address” at Mercer Union in Toronto, Canada (2025), and Emerson Contemporary in Massachusetts (2026).
Sanzgiri’s work has been screened extensively at festivals and venues around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Doclisboa, Viennale, Camden International Film Festival, REDCAT, de Appel, Jameel Arts Center, Menil Collection, Block Museum, MASS MoCA, moCa Cleveland, e-Flux, Carnegie Museum, Wexner Center for the Arts, 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 MacDowell, Pioneer Works, Denniston Hill, EMPAC, SOMA, 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 in BOMB Magazine, MOUSSE, e-Flux, Film Comment, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, Film Quarterly, SEEN Journal, Dissent, November Magazine, and more.