Greetings and salutations. My name is Salomé Sowa (they/them). I’m a queer, nonbinary director, writer, and multimedia artist born and raised in the American South—a reformed Catholic and recent graduate of NYU Tisch’s Film & TV program. My work interrogates the psychological terrain of selfhood—mind, body, and spirit—through Southern Gothic surrealism, body horror, and spiritual excavation. I’m drawn to stories that alchemize pain into light, that reclaim the sacred from the ruins of repression and religious trauma.
Since I was four, I’ve been telling stories—first with a shared Sony Handicam, coaxing cousins into mermaid epics and intergalactic melodramas. Even then, I understood that directing wasn’t just play; it was survival. I’d touch the static of our television and ask God to let me inside. My work still stems from that yearning: to enter the image, to be seen, and to tell stories that make others feel seen too.
My films explore themes of identity, grief, and embodiment—often through the lens of dream logic, Jungian psychology, and the grotesque beauty of transformation. As a nonbinary person, I confront the dissonance between the body and the soul, dissecting how gender is used as a vehicle for domination, violence, or erasure. My affinity for body horror is not incidental; it is political, spiritual, and personal.
My most recent short, Blue, Like Green, is an elegy for healing. Written in the shadow of my father’s death, it questions how we move from repression toward wholeness, and what it means to live beyond purgatory. Inspired by Buddhist notions of the 49-day bardo, the film situates grief as a liminal state—an invitation to return to ourselves.
I believe in the spiral: form without end, always in motion. That’s how I approach art—as a movement toward the center, toward truth. I’m deeply community-driven, passionate about building collaborative, LGBTQIA+-centered creative spaces. Prior to NYU, I wrote, directed, and produced Arcana Six, a queer coming-of-age short starring Jamila Gray (On the Come Up), which has since garnered over 370k views on OML’s YouTube channel.
There are still so few nonbinary directors working at the industry level. I aim to change that—not just for myself, but for the generations who come after. My hope is to carve space for stories that refuse binaries, that hold both joy and devastation, that let people breathe a little easier knowing they are not anomalies. They are sacred.
Reach out with any inquiries or to work with me! ⁺‧₊˚ ཐི⋆♱⋆ཋྀ ˚₊‧⁺
Instagram, @evildemonofimages