From Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces of Film 2026.
From: Louisville, KY, USA
Based in: Eureka, CA, USA
Newest project: Climate Control (2025) is a comedy about climate change and artificial intelligence. An earnest documentarian fights for control when an AI agent tries to defang her vérité project about fossil fuel extraction into a chirpy Hallmark movie.
Sarah Lasley, an associate art and film professor at Cal Poly Humboldt, developed the film collaboratively with her students, iterating on the script through a green-screen workshop approach. “I’ll have the class improvise a scene, and we’ll have six cameras set up, but there’s no plan,” she says. “Everyone is doing a role they’ve never done before, like sound or lighting.” Lasley then edits the footage using chroma-key compositing, and the mix of improv energy and “postproduction wizardry” makes the finished film feel especially “alive.”
As a multimedia element of the project, Lasley and researchers in Humboldt’s environmental studies program created “Prompt Responsibly,” a website that compiles available literature about the ethical implications and environmental impact of AI.
Origins: As a kid in Kentucky, armed with a camcorder and an array of household props, Lasley was drawn to remixing pop culture. To remake Wayne’s World, she and her sister used vinyl records for steering wheels, and she would invite friends over to reenact the The Oprah Winfrey Show (“it would get heavy so fast”). She studied painting as an undergraduate at the University of Louisville and as a graduate student at Yale, but she returned to video for the freedom she found in reenactment.
“I love how film can set up an impossible challenge, but if you’re a low-budget filmmaker, you’ll never get there,” she says. She compares it to karaoke: “I’m gonna sing Celine Dion, and my belief in myself will lift me to some unified belief in the room, but then I bomb the high note—but then everyone will love me. There’s this thin line where the viewer can either step in or step back. We can all see the seams of this and choose to overlook them together.”
All of this crystallized for Lasley in her breakout COVID-19 quarantine video piece, How I Choose to Spend the Remainder of My Birthing Years (2020). She green-screens herself into the love scene from Dirty Dancing (1987) to explore sexuality and gendered social norms, from puberty to middle age.
What’s next: Lasley is a member of the 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship class and is working on Muckrakers, a “hybrid documentary-musical about trash, labor, and climate gentrification in Humboldt County.” She’s codirecting the film with Nicola Waugh, and it will be scored by Mike E. Clark, producer for Insane Clown Posse.
—CL
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