Sebastián Rogers

Sebastián Lasaosa Rogers is a Spanish-American filmmaker and cinematographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Currently, he is in post-production on his first documentary feature film about an indigenous Guatemalan Chuj-Maya family on a journey across Mexico to free their niece, Juanita Alonzo Santizo, who was wrongfully detained in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, MX for over seven years after being coerced into signing a false confession in a language she didn't speak. He enjoys collaborating with artists and regularly contributing as a cinematographer for Art21’s short films about artists. His first feature documentary as cinematographer, The Art of Making It (2021), about the lives of emerging artists navigating the contemporary art world won the SXSW 2022 Audience Award in the Festival Favorites category. Esquilas en la montaña / Bells in the Mountains (2017), which Sebastián directed and filmed, screened at the New Orleans Film Festival and the San Francisco Documentary Festival. This observational short documentary followed two hundred cows from Sebastián’s cousins' hometown of Ulle, Spain making the three-day journey up the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains for the start of summer. He learned to make films while supporting activist campaigns in Nashville, TN where he studied film and anthropology at Vanderbilt University. Fluent in Spanish thanks to his Spanish immigrant mother, and having lived his first four years in Mexico, Sebastián volunteered at a bi-lingual workers center where he made his first films, supporting workers' rights organizing campaigns as well as the Fight for $15 movement across the country. When he’s not behind the camera, you might find Sebastián surfing the coasts around NYC and beyond, or planning themed parties and playing Dungeons and Dragons with his friends.