Andrea Sisson

Interdisciplinary filmmaker and artist, psychoanalytic researcher, writer, and educator whose work investigates how people make meaning through narrative forms, image, memory, and institutional life (b. 1987 in Cincinnati, Ohio; has lived and worked in Los Angeles, CA, and in 2021, relocated to New York City).

A Fulbright Fellow, Sisson holds an MFA from Bard College and an MSW focused on psychodynamic study. Sisson’s practice bridges experimental documentary, independent narrative, interdisciplinary practice, pedagogical experiments, hybrid-essay, and psychoanalytic inquiry. Central to her practice, Sisson’s films move between narrative invention and experimental documentary, exploring systems of memory and the limits of perception, and often use research as a foundation. Interested in material and form, and working across image, sound, text, and the document, her projects merge the personal and the structural, using poetic form, observation, and hybrid storytelling to explore the thresholds between visibility and erasure. For Sisson, the process of making and thinking involves inquiry, consideration, experimentation, witnessing, and audience communication. 

Sisson's moving image practice includes two independent feature films, experimental documentaries and video installations works. Her award-winning films and works have screened internationally at the São Paulo Museum of Image and Sound, the Palais de Tokyo (SFE ART TV), and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, among many others, and have been recognized by The New York Times and Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film." Her interdisciplinary writing has appeared in Filmmaker Magazine and the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Sisson’s interdisciplinary practice runs parallel to her filmmaking, offering a space for play, experimentation, and ongoing inquiry into forms of narrative and storytelling that reflect the human need to make sense of the world. Works include deconstructed narratives, participatory artworks, social projects, hybrid forms of writing and essay, photography, and collaborations in performance. Throughout, her work engages questions of institutional critique and perceived systems of value, with special attention on facilitating conditions through which stories, histories, and forms of subjectivity can emerge. Sisson has a particular interest in the document, treating the document itself as a site of formal experimentation that extends beyond the lens.

Community and pedagogy are equally important to Sisson's practice. Sisson channels her experiences into an investment in her community as a facilitator, educator, and collaborator. She teaches film, media, studio arts, and social practice. She is currently a professor in the Department of Film, Media, and Performing Arts at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and has been a visiting artist at Rhode Island School of Design and Carnegie Mellon. She supervises public and youth-led artworks, facilitates community projects, develops experimental pedagogies, mentors young artists, and works across disciplines as a creative producer, consultant, and dramaturg. Her facilitated projects have been curated as part of FotoFocus Biennial 2024 and 2026. Sisson has facilitated non-conventional and boundary-pushing projects. Her MFA mentor Yazan Khalil remarked, "For Sisson, community is material.”

Sisson’s psychoanalytic work extends her long-standing interest in narrative, subjectivity, witnessing, community, and institutional life. For Sisson, creative work and psychoanalysis are parallel methodologies through which she investigates the fundamental ways people organize experience and produce knowledge. As a licensed social worker, Sisson maintains a small, selective psychoanalytic practice in New York City while continuing her artistic and scholarly work. Sisson approaches this clinical work as an observer, the same vantage point as she does as an artist - with a curious and creative perspective. Rather than representing a departure from filmmaking and creative work, psychoanalytic inquiry has deepened questions that have always underpinned her practice: how stories emerge, how institutions shape experience, how systems of power assign value, and how meaning emerges through sustained listening.