A native of North Carolina and the only half-Chinese girl in her high school class, Sasie Sealy started making films while still an undergrad at Yale, where her sketch comedy training and study under photographer Gregory Crewdson birthed the Super 8 film Big Head and a life-long addiction to filmmaking. After stints living in Japan, working at NBC, and making movies in a basement in Queens, she attended NYU’s prestigious graduate film program, where she was a recipient of the New York Women in Film and Television Scholarship and the Steven J. Ross Fellowship.
Her short film Dance Mania Fantastic won the Student Visionary Award at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival and returned in 2006 as part of the +5 “Best of” Retrospective. Dance Mania Fantastic has also been included as part of the IFP Buzz Cuts series, been broadcast by the Australian SBS network, and has screened at numerous festivals around the world.
Sasie recently spent the summer in Arctic Alaska with fellow director Andrew MacLean filming the feature documentary When the Season is Good, which premiered at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC and was acquired by ARTE, European Public Television. Sasie’s new short The Elephant Garden debuts at the Tribeca Film Festival this spring, and she is currently in development on her first feature SARAHN_12, winner of the 2007 Sloan Foundation Feature Film Grant.
Sasie Sealy was awarded a Feature Production grant at NYU in 2007 for SARAHN_12