[7] Sasha Waters was born in Brooklyn and educated at the University of Michigan and the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she earned her BFA in Photography in 1991.
[15] Waters' second film, Razing Appalachia chronicled a years-long struggle against the expansion of a mountaintop removal mine by Arch Coal in rural West Virginia.
[16][17] Reviewing the documentary for The New Yorker when it aired on the PBS series Independent Lens in 2003, Nancy Franklin wrote that it was a good example of "what makes public TV valuable.
[25] Since 2019, Waters has been working on a documentary on the artist Bruce Conner and his unfinished film on the gospel group The Soul Stirrers titled Trouble Don't Last.
[26][27] She has also completed a trilogy of experimental short films that turn an anti-colonial and feminist lens onto the history of photography and cinema – cyanotypes in Ghost Protists, magic lantern glass slides in Fragile, and popular romance in Ashes of Roses.