Sierra Pettengill is a filmmaker from Brooklyn. Her work focuses primarily on the warped and dangerous historical narratives undergirding the United States.
Sierra has made methodically researched films about the evolution of the mid-20th Century police state, the consolidation of the modern gun lobby, the funding and construction of the nation’s largest Confederate monument, the politics of the image in the Reagan administration, and the early years of the Tea Party.
She has also directed several short films about artists and their collaborative projects, including Harun Farocki, Fritz Haeg, and the New York non-profit gallery Artists Space.
She has worked closely with archival material for over fifteen years. In addition to her own film practice, she has worked as an archival researcher and consultant for artists including Jim Jarmusch, Mike Mills, Laura Poitras, and Adam Pendleton. In 2013, she produced the Academy Award-nominated film Cutie & the Boxer, which also won an Emmy Award.
Sierra’s films have screened at Lincoln Center and MoMA in New York, the Barbican and ICA in London, the Sundance and Locarno film festivals, and in theaters, television broadcasts, and on streaming platforms around the world. In 2022, the Porto Post/Doc Festival in Portugal hosted a retrospective of her films.
Her writing on art and film has been published in frieze, ArtForum, Screen Slate, and Film Comment.
She was a Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow and is a Guggenheim Fellow. She has held residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo, and was a 2025 Shandaken printmaking resident. She is proud to serve as a board member of Screen Slate, a cinema non-profit based in New York.
Sierra is currently in post-production on a film about sailing and the end of history, and is producing Arielle de Saint Phalle’s documentary on Cookie Mueller, Garden of Ashes.