Sarah Seené is a French photographer and filmmaker based in Montréal (Quebec, Canada) who works with 35mm film, Super 8 and Polaroid. Born in the East of France in 1987, she obtained a Bachelor's degree in Lettres et Littératures Modernes at the Faculté de Sciences du langage de Besançon and a Master's degree in Recherches cinématographiques at the Faculté de Lettres et Langues de Poitiers. Her thesis was on the concept of idiocy in the Golden Heart Trilogy by filmmaker Lars Von Trier. Seené taught herself analogue photography at 16 years of age, when she began using a communal dark room near her home. Over a number of years, she has developed an aesthetic rooted in the documentary genre and characterized by a unique sensibility and poetry that addresses intimacy and what it is to be human.
Her photography has been exhibited and projected in several solo and group exhibitions internationally, such as at the Voix-off festival (France), Revela-T (Spain), Présences Photographies (France), Biennale de photographie en Condroz (Belgium), and Atoll artist-run centre (Canada). Her short films have been screened at many international festivals, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival (United States), the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma - FNC (Canada), the Engauge Experimental Film Festival (United States), Videoex (Switzerland), Ultracinema (Mexico), and Analogica (Italy).
Her film Lumen received the Best Experimental Short Film Award at the Festival on the Bayou (United States), the Best Extreme Short Documentary Award at Doc.Berlin Film Festival (Germany) and Second Prize at the International Rare Disease Film Festival (Germany). Her film Il fait gris dans ta tête, tout à coup, a collaboration with Guillaume Vallée, received the Rendez-vous Vidéo-Poésie Grand Jury Prize (Canada).