I’m a filmmaker, artist, educator and Buddhist practitioner who facilitates presence and attunement with the sensate, desiring body. I work artisanally with hand-processed celluloid film and with video to make experimental and documentary films, kinesthetic immersive installations, artist books and performance that engage personal and social history. Of particular interest is the relationship between art practice and dharma practice. My work is shared and screened internationally at museums, galleries, film festivals, microcinemas, and backyards. I’ve been recognized with a grant from the LEF Foundation for work on my upcoming feature-length documentary, and with fellowships from the Flaherty Seminar, the Massachusetts Cultural Council (2019 Film and Video finalist; 2013 New Media/Installation fellow), and Scotland’s Alchemy Film Festival. I am an Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm) alum, and a recipient of a Lightpress Grant from the Interbay Cinema Society. I received a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, teach cameraless filmmaking, and am a member of Boston’s AgX Film Collective.
News:
Millenium Film Journal reviews Unless You're Living It in their Fall 2022 issue. Take a look at the incisive review by David Bendiksen.
Unless You're Living It awarded Honorable Mention at 2019 Montreal Underground Film Festival.
In the words of the jurors:
"The hallucinatory and alienating experience of being marginal in North American towns today, rendered through hyper-saturated, reflected images, and the voices of those who live on the margin." - Rosanna Maule, Concordia University Film Studies faculty
"Despite its relatively short running time, UNLESS YOU’RE LIVING IT evokes an indelible sense of time and place, with Bliss deftly mixing sight and sound to create afterimages of an invisible community." - Mikaela Bobiy, Dawson College Humanities faculty
In other news, I'm honored to have been awarded a 2019 Massachusetts Cultural Council Film and Video Fellowship finalist award. I'm grateful for the citizen activism and lobbying that make it clear to state legislators how valuable the arts are to the shared life of our commonwealth.
In development:
La Petite Mort (The Little Death): An experimental feature documentary that testifies to the human capacity to craft lives of passion, purpose and fulfillment in the face of personal loss and socio-political repression. Using my own family as a lens, I explore how aging, illness and death affect desire. I investigate the changing socio-political construction, constraints upon, and expression of sexual desire and identity over the course of individual life spans and several generations (1940-2018).
Word on the street:
"How does an artist make a tactile work when the viewer can't touch anything? Sarah Bliss [and collaborator Rosalyn Driscoll have] done so. ... [They] have made haptic video." Marty Carlock's Sculpture magazine review of Blindsight. November 2015
"It was the installations that made the festival for me, particularly What It Is To Want It, a powerful film project by the filmmaker Sarah Bliss that juxtaposes readings from 17th-century Scottish religious texts with images of murky woodscapes and animal carcasses." Film reviewer Tim Cornwell in his Cornucopia Magazine writeup of the Alchemy Film Festival. April 16, 2014.